Yesterday evening (October 3rd), the KDE community announced the release of KDE 4.1.2, the second maintenance version of one of the most popular desktop managers, K Desktop Environment (KDE). It ships with many packages, including web development applications, educational tools, administrative programs and more, all of which are available in over 50 languages. The majority of applications have been improved to some extent, which has generated a large list of changes.

Here is a summary of them:

· KHTML, KDE's HTML layout engine, received many improvements and bug fixes;
· Frostbyte, the KHTML's JavaScript bytecode interpreter, was also improved;
· Konqueror includes the "Stop animations" function once again;
· Kopete, KDE's instant messenger client, was patched for the crashes in the Yahoo, ICQ and Gadu-Gadu protocols;
· The image thumbnail generator function of Gwenview, KDE's default picture viewer, was fixed;
· KGpg, the PGP security software in KDE, was patched against some strange crashes;
· The comicbook backend of Okular, the document viewer, was fixed;
· Improved speedup.

For a list with all the changes in this release, please visit the official changelog.

Everyone currently using KDE 4.1.1 is advised to update to the most recent version. More, similar updates of the 4.1 generation will follow in the next months, culminating with a new feature release, KDE 4.2.0, expected in January 2009.

About KDE

KDE (K Desktop Environment) is a technology team focused on open source and free software aimed mainly at desktop environment and portable computing. Benefiting from the efforts and participation of many volunteers, KDE has developed highly successful applications, among which are also included a widely used desktop system, office suites, and many more tools in different domains such as multimedia, graphics, web applications, software development and education.

If you don't want for your Linux distribution to update the KDE packages, you can download KDE 4.1.2 right now from Softpedia and compile them yourself.