Yesterday saw the release of KDE 4.3.1, announced exactly a month after the 4.3.0 milestone was given to the public. This new version features numerous bugfixes and performance improvements and, more importantly, it is now available in Croatian.

Among the important changes, KDE's user interface just got a little bit more stable and more pretty, as the toolbars don't crash anymore when being edited and some compositing-related bugs were fixed. Also, copied files that have been renamed now keep their names as they should, you can also rename files on remote shares, or put your huge documents in tar files using KTar without problems.

KMail received a lot of attention, and is now a lot more stable and feature-filled. If you're a Konqueror user, you can now employ the "Close all other tabs" function without being afraid of a crash, as that particular problem was fixed too.

On a sad note, this release is dedicated to Emma Hope Pyne, the daughter of Michael Pyne, who passed away suddenly last week. All of the KDE community is deeply saddened by this regrettable happening.

Installing KDE 4.3.1

If you're not up to compiling KDE yourself, there might be easier ways to get the latest KDE on your computer, depending on the distro you use.

If you are using Kubuntu, binary packages are released for it, both for the stable 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) distribution and for the 9.10 (Karmic Koala) development version. In 9.10, you will receive them as regular updates, but, for 9.04, you will have to install a personal package archive, as outlined in this Kubuntu news announcement.

Mandriva Linux 2009.0 and 2009.1 Spring users, along with openSUSE supporters, also benefit from precompiled packages for their distribution. Check the KDE 4.3.1 information page for the appropriate links.

If you're not among the users of the distributions mentioned above, just download KDE 4.3.1 from Softpedia and get the compilation process going.