KDE 4.0 Beta 3 Available Now

The first beta release of the most awaited project of this year, KDE 4.0, was just announced today by the hard-working people behind the KDE project: "The KDE Community is happy to release the third Beta for KDE 4.0. This Beta is aimed at further polishing of the KDE codebase and also marks the freeze of the KDE Development Platform. We are joined in this release by the KOffice project which releases its 4th alpha release, bringing many improvements in OpenDocument support, a KChart Flake shape and much more to those willing to test."

This third beta aims to show the progress that the KDE developers made in both desktop and development platform. Applications such as Dolphin, Konsole, Okular and most of the games and educational software are ready for in-depth testing. Please report bugs here. Other highlights are:

￭ Plasma improvements;
￭ Akonadi, a new infrastructure planned for KDE 4.1;
￭ KAlarm has been completely ported to KDE 4;
￭ Marble and Parley (ex KVoctrain) were greatly improved;
￭ Step, an interactive physics simulator;
￭ Gwenview was moved to the kdegraphics module for KDE 4;
￭ Konqueror received a cleaned up default profile and more polishing work;
￭ KWin was greatly improved;
￭ KLinkStatus was included in this release;
￭ Kolourpaint now supports remote color schemes;
￭ KOffice Alpha 4

The KDE 4.0 new release schedule:

October, 19th: Total Release Freeze, only critical bugfixes are allowed to get in. If in doubt, ask the release coordinator.
October, 30th: KDE 4.0 Release Candidate 1
November, 14th: KDE 4.0 Release Candidate 2
December, 11th: KDE 4.0

About KDE 4

KDE 4 is the next generation of the popular K Desktop Environment which seeks to fulfill the need for a powerful yet easy to use desktop for both personal and enterprise computing. The aim of the KDE project for the 4.0 release is to put the foundations in place for future innovations on the Free Desktop. The many newly introduced technologies incorporated in the KDE libraries will make it easier for developers to add rich functionality to their applications, combining and connecting different components in any way they want.

For more details on this beta release, please visit the KDE 4.0 Beta 3 official webpage.

Until the final release of KDE 4.0 will be available in late December, you can download this first beta version of KDE Four now from Softpedia and you can also download the KDE LiveCD version 0.4.1 based on the second beta release, from here.

Here are some screenshots from KDE 4 Beta 3: