
Highlights of KDE 4.3 are...
- Integration of many new technologies, such as PolicyKit and Geolocation services
- New Window animation effects, a more usable Run Command popup and many new and improved addons in Plasma
- Many bugfixes and improvements across all applications and more integration of features coming with the KDE 4 platform
Highlights of KDE 4 include...
- A streamlined hardware integration and multimedia experience thanks to the Solid and Phonon libraries
- A fully themable look taking advantage of modern graphics hardware combining the Oxygen artwork with the new Plasma desktop shell
- An extensive high-level development platform built on top of Qt, available in C++, Python, Ruby and other programming languages
Changes
General
- Policykit integration
- Settings module for actions triggered by hardware events
- Recent applications, titles and context menues for the classic application launcher
- New Tree Mode in System Settings
- Revisited user interface of the crash dialog, including backtrace parsing and rating
- A network:/ IO Slave to show services such as Zeroconf as view in the file manager
- Sorting folders in the file manager first is now optional
- Support for the mobipocket format in the document viewer and desktop search
Plasma Desktop & KWin Window Manager
- KRunner now displays all known syntax in the results area when Help button pressed
- Spacers for the panel
- Holidays are now displayed in the calendar of the clock
- Configurable keyboard shortcuts for Plasma
- Grouping support in Extenders
- "Open..." in notifications for finished jobs
- Entering into directories when hovering over them in the folder view
- Keyboard navigation in the zooming user interface and the folder view
- Animations of dialogs from the Panel
- SVG-themed desktop and panel toolbox
- Unit conversion library
- Completed wallpaper renderings can now be cached
- More complete JavaScript API
- Window manager elements now follow the Plasma theme
- Fading desktop switcher
- Windows sliding behind each other when changing focus
- New Plasmoids: Bubble Monitor (a playful system monitor), Magnifique (Plasma magnifier), Media Player, openDesktop (Social Desktop Plasmoid), Remember The Milk Plasmoid (time management), retro-style system load viewer, Unit converter
- New dataengines: Akonadi, Calendar Geolocation, keyboard state, access to Nepomuk metadata, Open Collaboration Services, Picture of the day, support for sun positioning and sunrise/sunset in the time engine
- Rich-text editing and text-zooming in the Notes applet
- Microblogging Plasmoid now also supports identi.ca
- Pastebin applet has been reworked
- The System tray can now show / hide icons based on their category
- Jobs are now grouped together
- Grouped windows' tooltips now also show previews
- Lancelot launcher: Improved theming, configurable actions for system buttons, clear document history
- Speaking the time from the clock
- Weather wallpaper displays a wallpaper matching the current weather
- The Virus wallpaper slowly eats your desktop
- Mandelbrot fractals as real-time computed wallpaper
- Marble Interactive desktop globe can be used as wallpaper
PIM
- Updated contact list in the instant messenging application Kopete
- Export, drag and drop and improved configuration in Alarm notifier
- A resource to sync Akonadi with Google Calendar
- Support for inserting inline images into emails in KMail
Games
- New game "Curse of the Mummy" in KGoldrunner, more accurate pause and resume and recording and replaying of games
- KPatience can now save the game state on exit to be restored later
- New in KDE 4: KTron
- Improved AI and asynchronous "thinking" in Bovo
- 70 new levels in KMahjongg
Others
- The moon and other Planets can now be displayed using the Marble desktop globe
- Support for imperial units, DGML2 and geolocation plugins in Marble
- The Juk music player now supports real translucency in track announcements
- UI improvements and better format handling in the compression tool Ark
- New bookmarking tool in Okteta hex editor
- KGpg, the GnuPG key manager has been ported to the new system tray
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.