KDE 1452 Published by

KDE 4.11 Beta 1 has been released




June 13, 2013. Today KDE released the beta of the new versions of Workspaces,
Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature
freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further
polishing.

The 4.11 releases include the following highlights and more:

Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces Qt Quick is continuing to make its way into
the Plasma Workspaces. Plasma Quick, KDE"s extensions on top of Qt Quick,
allow deeper integration and more powerful apps and Plasma components. One of
the central Plasma widgets, the task manager, was completely rewritten in
Plasma Quick. It got quite a few bug fixes on its way to the new QML version.
The Battery widget was overhauled. It now shows information about all the
batteries (e.g. mouse, keyboard) in a system. And the battery icons can now
show a finer-grained load-status.

Faster Nepomuk indexing The Nepomuk semantic engine received massive
performance optimizations (e.g., reading data is 6 or more times faster).
Indexing happens in two stages: the first stage retrieves general information
(such as file type and name) immediately; additional information like MP3
tags, author information and similar is extracted in a second, somehow slower
stage. Metadata display is now much faster. In addition, the Nepomuk backup
and restore system was improved. The system also got new indexers for
documents like odt or docx.

Kontact improvements Kontact got a faster indexer for its PIM data with
improvements to Nepomuk, and a new theme editor for email headers. The way it
handles email images now allows it to resize pictures on the fly. The whole
KDE PIM suite got a lot of bug fixes, such as the way it deals with Google
Calender resources. The PIM Import Wizard allows users to import settings and
data for Trojita (the Qt IMAP email client) and all other importers were
improved as well.

KWin and Path to Wayland Intial experimental support for Wayland was added
to KWin. KWin also got many OpenGL improvements including support being added
for creating an OpenGL 3.1 core context and robustness from using the new
functionality provided by the GL_ARB_robustness extension. Numerous KWin
optimizations are aimed at reducing CPU and memory overhead in the OpenGL
backend. Some desktop effects have been re-written in JavaScript to ease
maintenance.
  KDE 4.11 Beta 1 released