14 DAY TRIAL // The first beta of the upcoming KDE SC 4.7 has been released. From this point forward, the focus will be on bug fixing and polish, no new features will be added meaning that what you get with KDE SC 4.7 Beta 1 you'll also get with the final version, albeit in a rougher form.
"KDE has released a first beta of the upcoming 4.7 release of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Frameworks, which is planned for July 27, 2011," KDE announced.
"With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality," it added.
KDE SC 4.7 Beta 1 comes with a number of big new features. On the mobile front, it adds support for the OpenGL-ES 2.0 3D graphics standard which is mainly used by mobile devices, meaning that UI elements based on KDE can be hardware accelerated for significantly better performance.
For desktop users, the highlight is the improved Dolphin file browser, which comes with a few UI enhancements and tweaks as well as better file metadata search.
A small but great feature is the possibility of restarting your computer into the operating system of your choice, if you have more than one installed. KDE can get a list of OSs available from Grub2 and allow users to choose one from the log off dialog.
Release schedule for KDE SC 4.7:
· May 25, 2011 - KDE 4.7 Beta 1 Release
· June 8, 2011 - KDE 4.7 Beta 2 Release
· June 22, 2011 - KDE 4.7 Release Candidate 1 Release
· July 6, 2011 - KDE 4.7 Release Candidate 2 Release
· July 27, 2011 - KDE 4.7 Release
Remember that this is a testing release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. Please report bugs to bugs.kde.org. Please report any possible security issues to security [at] kde.org.