There's a New KDE Sheriff in Town, Linux Mint Nadia 14.0 RC – Screenshot Tour

Linux Mint KDE, a modern, elegant and comfortable operating system based on Ubuntu and Debian, has just reached version 14.0 RC.

Just like the simple Linux Mint 14.0, the KDE version shares the same codename, Nadia. As the name suggests, this release is built on the KDE desktop environment, version 4.9.2 to be more exact.

As expected, switching to a new version of KDE does have some perks. First of all, the Dolphin file manager comes with some visual improvements, features which can be observed in the screenshots attached at the end of the article.

The most important changes in Dolphin are the introduction of “back” and “forward” buttons, the ability to show metadata such as ratings, tags, image and file sizes, author, and date, grouping and sorting by metadata properties, better search support, and synchronization with terminal location.

Other changes include the ability to search for a text selection using KDE Web Shortcuts, detachable tabs which can be dragged to create a new window, and a new “Change Directory To” feature that can be used when a folder is dropped on the Konsole window.

The Software Manager also received some “under the hood” improvements. It no longer uses aptdaemon, which apparently was responsible for crashing or freezing the application under certain conditions.

This means that the Software Manager provides full debconf support, so the user doesn't need to use Synaptic anymore for debconf-enabled packages (such as the Microsoft Fonts or Wine).

Other system improvements include the replacement of USB-ImageWriter with MintStick (which has a better interface and better progress reporting), not to mention the fact that Linux Mint KDE now falls back to OpenDNS when the system fails to contact a valid DNS server.

Linux Mint KDE 14 RC features the following upstream components: Ubuntu 12.10, Linux 3.5, KDE 4.9.2.

Check out the official announcement for a complete list of new features.

Download Linux Mint KDE 14 RC Nadia right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.