14 DAY TRIAL // With KDE Applications 18.04 reached end of life with the third and last point release, the KDE Project started working earlier this month on the next release of their open-source software suite, KDE Applications 18.08.
KDE Applications is an open-source software suite designed as part of the KDE ecosystem, but can also be used independently on any Linux-based operating system. To fully enjoy the KDE Plasma desktop environment, users will also need to install various of the apps that are distributed as part of the KDE Applications initiative.
KDE Applications 18.08 is the next major version of the open-source software suite slated for release on August 16, 2018. As of yesterday, July 20, the KDE Applications 18.08 software suite entered beta testing as version 18.07.80, introducing two new libraries, KPkPass and KItinerary.
While KItinerary is an open-source library consisting of itinerary extraction code and itinerary data model used for data model, data extraction, and data augmentation, KPkPass is an open-source library designed to reader Apple Wallet pass files, probably for importing them in other apps.
KDE Applications 18.08 Release Candidate arrives August 2
The next step in the development cycle of the KDE Applications 18.08 open-source software suite is the Release Candidate (RC) milestone, which is expected to land on August 2 as version 18.07.90. After that, the final release is scheduled to hit the streets on August 16, 2018, a few days after the release of KDE Frameworks 5.49.0.
With both the dependency and feature freeze in full effect, the KDE Project is now focusing only on fixing bugs and polishing last minute details for the final release of the KDE Applications 18.08 software suite, and they need your help to test it and report bugs and other issues they might encounter to improve its quality and stability.
"Actual users are critical to maintaining high KDE quality, because developers simply cannot test every possible configuration. We're counting on you to help find bugs early so they can be squashed before the final release. Please consider joining the team by installing the beta and reporting any bugs," reads the announcement.
Unfortunately, beta versions of the KDE Applications aren't available for installation on any GNU/Linux distribution, but you can always test them in the KDE neon Developer Editions or compile the source packages using the instructions provided by the KDE Project here.