KDE 4.10 Beta 1 Has Been Officially Released

The KDE Project announced yesterday, November 21, the immediate availability for download of the first beta of KDE Software Compilation 4.10 branch.

KDE SC 4.10 Beta 1 has been expected for quite some time and, judging from the number of changes and improvements, it's safe to say it was worth the wait.

According to the developer, with the API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.

Highlights of KDE 4.10 Beta 1:

• Qt Quick is now available in Plasma Workspaces. Plasma Quick, KDE's extensions on top of QtQuick, allow deeper integration with the system and more powerful apps and Plasma components;
• Various Plasma widgets have been rewritten in QtQuick, notably the system tray, pager, notifications, lock & logout, weather and weather station, comic strip and calculator plasmoids;
• A new screen locking mechanism, based on QtQuick, has been added, bringing more flexibility and security to Plasma Desktop;
• A new QtQuick-based wallpaper engine has been implemented, making animated wallpapers much easier to create;
• A technique called tiled rendering allows Okular to zoom in much further, while reducing memory consumption;
• Improvements in the Nepomuk semantic engine allow faster indexing of files;
• Gwenview, KDE's smart image viewer, and Plasma's Window Manager now support color correction and can be adjusted to the color profile of different monitors, allowing for more natural representation of photos and graphics;
• Plasma's notifications are now rendered using QtQuick. Notifications themselves, especially concerning power management, have been cleaned up;
• Kate, KDE's Advanced Text Editor, has received multiple improvements regarding user feedback. It is now extensible using Python plugins.

Check out the official announcement for a complete list of changes and improvements.

Download KDE 4.10 Beta 1 sources right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a beta version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.