14 DAY TRIAL // The KDE Project just announced the immediate availability for download of KDE Software Compilation 4.11 Beta 1.
The beta version of the new Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform are now available for testing.
“With the large number of changes, the 4.11 releases need a thorough testing in order to maintain and improve the quality and user experience.
“Actual users are critical to maintaining high KDE quality, because developers simply cannot test every possible configuration,” reads the official announcement.
With the API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing.
Highlights of KDE 4.11 Beta 1:
• Qt Quick has been better integrated in Plasma Workspaces. One of the central Plasma widgets, the task manager, has been completely rewritten in Plasma Quick; • The Battery widget has been overhauled and it now shows information about all the batteries in a system; • The Nepomuk indexing has been increased and reading data is 6 or more times faster than in the previous versions; • Various Kontacts have been implemented, which include faster indexing, a new theme editor, and a lot of bug fixes; • KWin has received many OpenGL improvements, including optimizations aimed at reducing CPU and memory overhead; • The whole KDE PIM suite has received a lot of bug fixes; • The PIM Import Wizard now allows users to import the settings and the data for Trojita (the Qt IMAP email client), and all other importers have been improved as well; • The Nepomuk backup and restore system has been improved and the system also received some new indexers for documents like ODT or DOCX.
Check out the official announcement for a complete list of changes and improvements.
Download the KDE 4.11 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.