The KDE developers are almost right on time, because a month ago they churned up version 4.3.1 of their desktop environment, and yesterday saw the release of KDE 4.3.2. This translation and service upgrade contains a huge amount of bugfixes and graphical improvements, dispelling the negative impression that KDE 4 left us with.

You will observe that KConfig won't lose your settings if the disk is full, KFile won't crash anymore if you try to copy files while their previews are being generated, applets don't tend to go wrong when they are set to group "only when full," Dolphin and Knoqueror are more stable too and, overall, the whole desktop is more solid.

One of the visually appealing improvements in KDE 4.3.2 is that most of the window effects are actually usable and don't crash your desktop all the time. The CoverSwitch and the BoxSwitch effects don't create problems anymore when the window is closed, the Slideback effect works as it should when there are multiple modal windows on the screen, and many other effects have been fixed. Also, Present Windows effect doesn't rearrange the layout of your currently opened programs and the screen doesn't flicker anymore when effects are unloaded.

KMail has been receiving a lot of attention in the last KDE releases, and this is also true for 4.3.2. The fixes for this application represent almost half of KDE 4.3.2's changelog. Many crashes have been repaired and some rough spots are now less prone to creating problems. Also, your e-mails are in less of a danger of being deleted if you try to rename an offline IMAP folder and KMail is more feature complete.

Installing KDE 4.3.2

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 9.10 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 4.3.2 information page for the appropriate links.

If you use another Linux distribution, just download KDE 4.3.2 from Softpedia and compile it from source.