14 DAY TRIAL // The KDE Community has announced that KDE Frameworks 5 Beta 3 has been released, bringing the entire project closer to the final version.
A new development build of KDE Frameworks 5 is now out and the developers are making great progress. If things continue to evolve according to the plan KDE has laid out, we should see this new desktop environment pretty soon.
“This beta features multiple bug fixes, and the finishing touches required to ease the transition for developers to the newest iteration of the KDE Frameworks. This process has included contributions back to Qt5, the modularisation of the kdelibs, and general improvements to the components that developers can use to improve their applications and user experience.”
“This pre-release improves co-installability with kdelibs4 and with future versions of KDE Frameworks (i.e. 6). This is also the first release with translations for Frameworks using the KDE's i18n translation system,” said the developers in the announcement.
There is still a lot of work left to be done, but it looks like the developers have everything under control and the release schedule is being respected.
You should check out the official release notes for more details about this build. In the meantime, you can download KDE Frameworks 5 Beta 3 from the official website.
You also have to keep in mind that KDE Frameworks 5 Beta 3 is a sophisticated piece of software and you really need to know what you are doing if you decide to compile it. It features a lot of dependencies, but the provided wiki should offer some assistance.
Fortunately, a number of distributions provide support for the development branch of KDE Frameworks 5, like Arch Linux, AOSC, Fedora, Kubuntu, and OpenSuSE. So, if you have one of these OSes, you should give it a try.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.