KDE 4.3 promises polish, polish, polish

The Linux K Desktop Environment project spun out KDE 4.3 yesterday.

It's the outfit's latest version of the much-loved desktop suite for Linux and Unix platforms.

KDE 4.3, codenamed "Caizen", was built by a global community of 700 contributors who have slaved over 63,000 code tweaks, and 10,000 bug fixes since the start of the year.

"It is unlikely that any one specific thing will strike the user as the most noticeable improvement; rather, the overall user experience of KDE has improved greatly in KDE 4.3.0," said the community's Sebastian Kügler in a blog post.

"The release's codename, Caizen, is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life. That has been the goal of the KDE team for 4.3.0: polish, polish, polish."

So what's new in this version of the suite?

The group said 2,000 feature requests were implemented in the past six months.

Developers focused primarily on the desktop workspace, apps and development platform.

They've improved the partnership between KWin and KDE's desktop interface. The apps tree view is out-with-the-new-in-with-the-old as the system settings now more closely resemble version 3.0 of the suite, said the group.

On the platform front, it's added a geolocation plugin for Plasma applet developers. There's also a KDE-style API that the group said makes it easier to "temporarily elevate privileges for an application."

The group has the full skinny on all the changes here. ®