KDE SC 4.5.0 Gets Released on Wednesday

For KDE users like me who can never wait to get a hold of the latest version, tomorrow will be the day to celebrate, as the developers will be releasing the final version of KDE 4.5. This latest version follows up to February’s launch of 4.4, and rather than unveil a bunch of new enhancements, 4.5 looks to tackle a lot of bugs, and refine some of KDE’s rougher edges.

One of the more important improvements with 4.5 is a cleaned-up D-Bus backed notification area – the part of the system tray that notifies you about various KDE happenings, such as whether external storage has been plugged in, the status of the desktop search and other things. Currently, the notification area is one of the best features of KDE in my opinion, but I sure wouldn’t turn down any improvements. You can get a quick preview of this here.

4.5 also marks the introduction of KWin-Tiling, which is an interesting method to handling multiple application windows at once, with the ability to manipulate them in various ways. Essentially, being able to handle your applications in “tiles” is designed to improve workflow, but I admit, I’m still not quite sure I fully understand it or could see me using it. You can see an example of the tiling in action here. It’s interesting, that’s for sure.

For long-time users of KMail, KDE’s e-mail application, 4.5 is going to be a welcomed release as KMail 2.0 will finally be released. I’m not entirely sure what this major version brings to the table, but I’m sure all of the details will be laid out in the press release tomorrow. At the least, it’s going to be making heavier use of the Nepomuk indexing engine, so searching and tagging e-mails should be easier than ever.

In addition to these features, 4.5 will also replace KPackage with KPackageKit, introduce a reworked netbook interface and generally improve stability. I’m sure there’s lots more set to be delivered, but it’s difficult to get all of the information in an easy-to-read format until the official release, so stay tuned to the official site tomorrow and get to downloading! I’ll likely download and install right away and will follow-up with my thoughts not to long afterward.

The KDE Community continues to fulfill the promise of delivering state of the art architecture with its Development Platform. The Applications in Software Compilation 4.5 take advantage of this, introducing improvements across the board in terms of innovative new features, greater ease of use, accessibility, good looks, better networking and further internationalization.