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KDE Software Compilation 4.11 Released

Posted by Unknown on from the desktop-for-a-gnu-world dept.

jrepin writes "The KDE community has released version 4.11 of Software Compilation, which is dedicated to the memory of Atul 'toolz' Chitnis, a great Free and Open Source Software champion from India. This version of Plasma Workspaces will be supported for at least two years, and delivers further improvements to basic functionality with a smoother taskbar, smarter battery widget and improved sound mixer. The introduction of KScreen brings intelligent multi-monitor handling. KWin window manager incorporates first experimental support for Wayland. This release marks massive improvements in the Kontact PIM suite, giving much better performance and many new features, like scam detection and scheduling e-mail sending. Kate text editor improves the productivity of Python and Javascript developers with new plugins, Dolphin file manager became faster, and the educational applications bring various new features. The Nepomuk semantic storage and search engine received substantial performance improvements." The performance enhancements to nepomuk (KDE's semantic desktop engine) are particularly welcome. This release of the Plasma desktop also marks the end of Plasma version one; primary development focus will now switch to updating KDE for Qt 5. There should still be more updates to KDE 4, however. Also released recently by the KDE team was the first RC of Plasma Media Center 1.1.

4 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good to see the progress by oodaloop · · Score: 5, Funny

    I've since switched to XFCE since Gnome went batshit crazy

    Why didn't you just use Unity?

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    Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
  2. Trinity seems to be kickin' as well by jones_supa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    For anyone who's interested, the other day I noticed that Trinity Desktop , the KDE 3.5 spinoff, is also still alive. Just got a new release this summer. :)

  3. Re:Good to see the progress by Metrol · · Score: 5, Informative

    As someone who also moved to XFCE via Xubuntu a while back I've certainly got a few reasons...

    I want to be the one who decides which mouse button does what, without having to alter source code and recompiling.
    I want to be the one who decides where minimize and close buttons go on the task bar.
    All things Email are tied into Evolution, which can't even manage to put deleted mail into an IMAP trash folder.
    Nautilus... ack!
    XFCE does most of the things that Gnome used to get right, while doing none of the crazy that Unity pushes.

    In all fairness, I was never a long term user of Unity. Configurability was a huge enough issue for me that I couldn't give it the time. I was a regular user of KDE into the 4.x days. After seeing one too many "Plasma Desktop Crashed" errors I went looking for an alternative.

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  4. Re:A Note about Plasma by Tailhook · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This has the appearance of being planned by adults. Put a bow on Plasma and shift resources to the Qt 5 port, refactoring oversize bits and reducing interdependence.

    At least it makes sense. Sometimes GUI/DE people fail to do that. Make sense, I mean.

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