The fourth and we really hope it's the last beta release of the most awaited project of this year, KDE 4.0, was announced last night by the hard-working people behind the KDE project: "The KDE Community is happy to release the fourth Beta for KDE 4.0. This Beta aimed at further polishing of the KDE codebase and we would love to start receiving feedback from testers."

This fourth beta aims to encourage those who want to test KDE 4, to help the KDE team in finding bugs so they can fix them quickly. Among some minor improvements and features, the KDE 4 desktop shell, Plasma, received some deep love from the KDE developers in this fourth beta. Sebastian Kügler, one of the KDE developers, says: "The improvements have been huge, and plasma is much closer to what it needs to be before the release. I am confident

we will be able to finish it and present a very usable plasma to our userbase with KDE 4.0. We will then be able to extend on that and present truly innovative desktop interfaces throughout the KDE 4 lifecycle."

Once again, this release is very important, as the KDE developers rely on the KDE community to help them find and solve any bug, no matter how important or unimportant it is. So if you want to make KDE 4.0 one of the best desktop environments ever, please Get it, run it, test it...

The KDE 4.0 new release schedule:

Starting with October, 30th: KDE 4.0 Release Candidate Cycle
December, 20th: KDE 4.0 Final Release

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 4 official webpage.

Until the final release of KDE 4.0 will be available in late December, you can download this fourth beta version of KDE Four now from Softpedia and you can also download the KDE LiveCD version 0.6 based on this fourth beta release, from here.