KDE 4.0.4, the fourth bugfix and maintenance release for the 4.x branch of KDE, was announced today by the KDE Community. KDE 4 ships with a basic desktop and applications for system administration, networking, educational and multimedia software, games, web development tools and much more.

These release updates are issued on a monthly basis, until July, this year, when KDE 4.1 will be launched. The desktop is much stable now and in case you use a previous version of KDE 4, you should update, because corrections were made in a manner that brings only a reduced risk of regressions.

The user interface received its share of optimizations, and will perform much faster now. From now on, the pixmaps will be reused for every frame, and KAnimatedButton will cache, thus reducing the X pixmap usage.

Here are some of the improvements and bugfixes in KDE 4.0.4:

khtml:

￭ The form widgets' baselines were reworked to align on the text content.
￭ The CSS3 UI cursor support was improved.
￭ Rework the tracking of stylesheets' loaded state, preventing it from losing synchronization in some cases involving @import.
￭ Fix absolutely positioned static elements being misplaced and drawn on top of the border when they are the only child of a block.

Klipper:

￭ The crash that happened at logout was fixed.

Konqueror:

￭ Fixed shellcmdplugins and remoteencoding plugins.

PyKDE:

￭ Fixes the problem where menu item text doesn't appear when using the Oxygen style.
￭ Updated the sip files; fixes crashes with KConfig and related classes.

Kopete:

￭ Create a user writable directory for chat style installation if none exists yet, to enable installation of custom chat styles.
￭ Ensure that the text input field has focus in the chat window so that e.g. pasting text always works when the chat window has focus.
￭ Fix the latex script for dash based systems (like *buntu).

Okular:

￭ The "Print" menu action is now correctly enabled.
￭ Okular now updates accordingly when a bookmark for the current document is removed.

The above mentioned changes are only a few of the bugfixes and improvements available in KDE 4.0.4.

Download KDE 4.0.4 right now from Softpedia.

Download KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 right now from Softpedia.

Please note that this is a development release and should NOT be used on production machines.