14 DAY TRIAL // Today, December 15, 2016, as expected, KDE announced the general availability of the KDE Applications 16.12 software suite for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environments on various Linux-based operating systems.
KDE Applications 16.12 had a short development cycle, since November 10, 2016, when it entered Dependency Freeze stage. A Beta was announced one week later, on November 17, and the Release Candidate build landed two weeks later, on the first day of December. And now, the final release is here with numerous goodies.
"KDE introduces KDE Applications 16.12, with an impressive array of upgrades when it comes to better ease of access, the introduction of highly useful functionalities and getting rid of some minor issues, bringing KDE Applications one step closer to offering you the perfect setup for your device," reads the official announcement.
Here's what's new in KDE Applications 16.12
Prominent new features of KDE Applications 16.12 include the addition of the Kwave sound editor, porting of the Konqueror, KGpg, KTouch, Okular, and Kalzium applications to the KDE Frameworks 5, as well as the split of kdepim, kdewebdev, and kde-baseapps tarballs for easy building of standalone applications.
More of the goodies that were available in KDE Plasma 4 make a comeback to Plasma 5, and it looks like the Marble world atlas has been updated to include both a Widget and Wallpaper, which display the time on top of a satellite view of the Earth in real time, day and night.
The Unicode Emoticons block is now displayed by KCharSelect, Julia is the new backend of the Cantor front-end to mathematical software, the Ark archive manager is now capable of opening AR files and lets users rename, copy or move files and folders within an archive, as well as offers encryption and compression options.
Last but not least, the Kopete instant messenger received support for X-OAUTH2 SASL authentication for the Jabber protocol, a new Rotoscoping effect, an updated Motion Tracker, and support for downloadable content landed for the Kdenlive video editor, while Akregator and KMail can now use Google Safe Browsing for checking malicious links.
A total of 130 bugs have been fixed in KDE Applications 16.12, which should make its way into the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution as we speak (it looks like it's already in Arch Linux Community Testing), so make sure that you update your systems as soon as possible.
As expected, KDE Applications 16.12 will have a total of three maintenance releases, and the first one, KDE Applications 16.12.1, will hit the streets on January 12, 2017. The other two, namely KDE Applications 16.12.2 and KDE Applications 16.12.3, are arriving February 9 and March 9, respectively.
