KDE 4.3 Beta 2 Out For Testing

KDE Community Ships Second Beta Version of KDE 4.3 Free Desktop, Containing Many New Features and Improvements

June 9th, 2009. The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.3 Beta 2, the second preview of the 3rd iteration over the KDE 4 desktop, applications and development platform.
KDE 4.3 focuses on polishing and completing the user experience by providing a modern and beautiful Free working environment. KDE's award-winning tools and applications are available in more than 50 languages. After the first beta, the focus has now shifted clearly from the implementation of new features to polishing the user experience for the 4.3 release. As there's still well over a month until we would like to give testers an update of KDE 4.3's status. In the last month, 2991 bugs have been closed and 3008 new bugs opened, meaning that there is a lot of testing and fixing going on.

Highlights of KDE 4.3 are...

Please note that KDE 4.3 Beta 2 is not suitable for end users. Its sole purpose is gathering feedback and testing. Following that, we recommend those that are merely out for an upgrade but cannot live with severe instabilities to wait until KDE 4.3.0 is released in late July.

The tree mode and the default icon mode in System Settings

Highlights of KDE 4 include...

Changes

General

Plasma Desktop & KWin Window Manager

Plasma Addons

PIM

Games

Others


Peeking into directories in Plasma and, formatting options in the notes applet and the translatoid
Note that the changelog is usually incomplete, for a complete list of changes that went into KDE 4.3 Beta 2, you can browse the Subversion log.

To find out more about the KDE 4 desktop and applications, please refer to the KDE 4.2.0, KDE 4.1.0 and KDE 4.0.0 release notes.

Installing KDE 4.3 Beta 2 Binary Packages

Packagers. Some Linux/UNIX OS vendors have kindly provided binary packages of KDE 4.3 Beta 2 for some versions of their distribution, and in other cases community volunteers have done so. Some of these binary packages are available for free download from KDE's http://download.kde.org. Additional binary packages, as well as updates to the packages now available, may become available over the coming weeks.

Package Locations. For a current list of available binary packages of which the KDE Project has been informed, please visit the KDE 4.3 Beta 2 Info Page.

Compiling KDE 4.3 Beta 2 (a.k.a. 4.2.90)

The complete source code for KDE 4.3 Beta 2 may be freely downloaded. Instructions on compiling and installing KDE 4.3 Beta 2 are available from the KDE 4.3 Beta 2 Info Page.

Supporting KDE

KDE is a Free Software community that exists and grows only because of the help of many volunteers that donate their time and effort. KDE is always looking for new volunteers and contributions, whether it is help with coding, bug fixing or reporting, writing documentation, translations, promotion, money, etc. All contributions are gratefully appreciated and eagerly accepted. Please read through the Supporting KDE page for further information.