14 DAY TRIAL // Today, August 18, 2016, KDE has had the great pleasure of announcing the availability of the final release of KDE Applications 16.08, the latest stable and most advanced software suite for the KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop environment.
KDE Applications 16.08 has been in development since July and had a Beta release pushed to public testers on July 21, followed by an RC (Release Candidate) build two weeks later, on August 4. This version replaces the now-deprecated KDE Applications 16.04 series, which reached end of life with the KDE Applications 16.04.3 maintenance update.
New features in KDE Applications 16.08 are the porting of the Cervisia version control system front-end, KDiskFree media information utility, and KolourPaint painting program to KDE Frameworks 5. Additionally, more work was done for the Kontact personal information manager and groupware software, and several packages are no longer supported.
"In the continued effort to split Kontact Suite libraries to make them easier to use for third parties, the kdepimlibs tarball has been split into akonadi-contacts, akonadi-mime and akonadi-notes," reads today's announcement. "We have discontinued the following packages: kdegraphics-strigi-analyzer, kdenetwork-strigi-analyzers, kdesdk-strigi-analyzers, libkdeedu and mplayerthumbs. This will help us focus in the rest of the code."
KDE Applications 16.08 will have three point releases
Among other noteworthy changes brought by the KDE Applications 16.08 release, we can mention that the Marble virtual globe and world atlas software was updated to version 2.0. Then, there's a major update that includes navigation and map rendering improvements, as well as an experimental vector rendering of OpenStreetMap data. Ark, KDE's archive manager tool, received support for extracting AppImage and .xar files.
The latest version of Ark also lets users add or edit comments in .rar archives. The Konsole terminal emulator got some improvements as well, in particular in the font rendering and accessibility areas, Kate text editor now features movable tabs, and it looks like the KGeography geography learning tool sports provinces and regions maps of Burkina Faso.
As expected KDE Applications 16.08 will have a total of three point releases until it reaches end of life. The first one, KDE Applications 16.08.1, will be announced next month, on September 8, the second one, KDE Applications 16.08.2, on October 13, and the last one, KDE Applications 16.08.3, on November 10, 2016. KDE Applications 16.08 should soon land in the main repos of your GNU/Linux distro.