14 DAY TRIAL // The KDE Project developers have announced that the final 4.14 version for Applications and Platform has been released and is now available for download.
The KDE developers have launched the final version of KDE 4.14, which will soon be replaced by KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE Plasma 5. This is not the end of the world for people who love KDE, but it's likely that not everyone will embrace the new direction.
KDE Applications 4.14.x will continue to receive updates until November and it will have three different point releases. The last version in the series will be KDE 4.14.3, so the end of support for this branch will arrive pretty fast, in just a few months’ time.
“KDE Applications 4.14 is not about lots of ‘new and improved stuff.’ Many KDE developers are focused on the Next Experience (Plasma 5) or porting to KDE Frameworks (based on Qt5). Mostly, the 4.14 release is needed by aspects of our workflow (such as translations). This release offers more software stability, with little emphasis on new and less-proven stuff.”
“Most previous releases had highlights of new features and prominent applications. This gave some people the impression that KDE developers favored new-and-shiny over quality, which is not true. So for this announcement of the 4.14 Release, developers were asked for details—small, incremental improvements and bugfixes that might not even be noticeable to most users. These are the kinds of tasks that most developers work on, the kinds of tasks that allow beginners to make meaningful, mostly invisible contributions,” the developers say.
According to the changelog, support has been added for SOCKS5 proxy in ICQ protocol (before only HTTP type was supported), support has been implemented for audio calls, a new Lua backend has been added, the VI mode for Kate has been improved, Dolphin now shows thumbnails of .gpx, .kml and other file types supported by Marble, and various KML improvements have been implemented as well.
More details about the changes, fixes, and new features of this build can be found in the official announcement. Also, you can download the latest KDE Applications and Development Platform 4.14 sources right now from the official website.
This is just the source package and it's unlikely that it will show up in any repositories before the next version is out, although there is one distro that already managed to integrate it, KaOS, and we have a gallery for this OS.