KDE 4.3 polished and ready to go

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 6 Aug 2009 at 09:27

The KDE community has released version 4.3 of its popular Linux desktop environment.

Dubbed Caizen - Japanese for continued improvement - the release brings a host of incremental upgrades, including 63,000 code tweaks and 10,000 bug fixes since the start of the year.

The project reports that around 700 people contributed to the release, which is focused on "polish, polish, polish".

"It is unlikely that any one specific thing will strike the user as the most noticeable improvement; rather, the overall user experience of KDE has improved greatly in KDE 4.3.0," the community notes.

With expectations suitably lowered, perhaps the biggest change is the tighter integration of Plasma, KDE's desktop shell, and KWin, the window manager responsible for KDE's shiny 3D effects. This allows KDE users to operate separate widgets and wallpapers on each virtual desktop.

Dolphin, KDE's file manager, has also been tweaked to offer video and image previews when the mouse is hovered over a directory containing media.

The team's also reporting significant performance improvements, leading to smoother animations on weaker machines.