KDE 4.10 RC arrives as beta lands in openSUSE 12.3 milestone 2

The KDE developers have announced the first release candidate for KDE 4.10, the next major release of the Qt-based desktop environment and software collection. The new edition of KDE makes much more use of Qt Quick technology, integrating the declarative language for user interfaces with the Plasma Workspaces.

Widgets such as the system tray, pager, notifications, logout, weather, and calculator have now been rewritten with Qt Quick, and the new screen locker and wallpaper engine now use QtQuick to make them more flexible. The Okular reader has better zooming and the touch friendly Okular Active has been added to the collection. There are also improvements in colour correction, print management, the KATE text editor, touch typing tutorials and in indexing performance. A full list of all changes is available in the KDE 4.10 Feature Plan.

The source for KDE 4.10 RC, also known within the KDE project as version 4.9.95, is available for download – community builds for various Linux distributions will be listed on the community wiki.

Meanwhile, the openSUSE developers have released the second milestone for the next version of their Linux distribution, 12.3. The developers have changed their policy, allowing the second beta of KDE 4.10 to be included in this milestone. The previous policy had only allowed finished KDE releases to be included in openSUSE milestones, but the developers feel that the circumstances are right to start early integration and testing.

If all goes to plan, the final version of openSUSE 12.3 will arrive in March 2013 and will include either KDE 4.10.0 or 4.10.1. The most noteworthy other update is for LibreOffice, jumping from version 3.5.4 to 3.6.3 and in the process fixing bugs, improving DOCX compatibility, and enhancing image resizing. There is also an updated GNOME 3.6.3 included and updates to Claws Mail, the GNU C Library, QEMU, LLVM, Mono 3 and libzypp. The release comes with a 3.6 Linux kernel but the developers say a 3.7 kernel package is "already cooking".

The openSUSE 12.3 Milestone 2 is available to download, but, as a development version, readers are reminded that they should not put the software into production use as it is primarily intended for testing.

(djwm)