The KDE Community is proud to announce the latest major updates to KDE Applications delivering new features and fixes. With Plasma Workspaces and the KDE Platform frozen and receiving only long term support, those teams are focusing on the technical transition to Frameworks 5. The upgrade in the version number for the Platform is only for packaging convenience. All bug fixes and minor features developed since the release of Platform 4.11 have been included. This release is translated into 52 languages; more languages are expected to be added in subsequent monthly minor bugfix releases. The Documentation Team updated several application handbooks for this release.

KDE Applications 4.12 Bring Huge Step Forward in Personal Information Management and Improvements All Over

This release marks substantial improvements in the KDE PIM stack, giving much better performance and many new features. Kate added new features including initial Vim-macro support, and games and educational applications bring a variety of new features. The announcement for the KDE Applications 4.12 has more information.

KDE Platform 4.12 Becomes More Stable

This release of KDE Platform 4.12 only includes bugfixes and minor optimizations and features. About 20 bugfixes as well as several optimizations have been made to various subsystems, including KNewStuff, KNotify4, file handling and more. Notably, Nepomuk received bugfixes and indexing abilities for MS Office 97 formats. A technology preview of the Next Generation KDE Platform, named KDE Frameworks 5, is coming this month. Read this article to find out what is coming.

Spread the Word

Non-technical contributors are an important part of KDE's success. While proprietary software companies have huge advertising budgets for new software releases, KDE depends on people talking with other people. Even for those who are not software developers, there are many ways to support the 4.12 releases. Report bugs. Encourage others to join the KDE Community. Or and support the nonprofit organization behind the KDE community.

Please spread the word on the Social Web. Submit stories to news sites, use channels like delicious, digg, reddit, and twitter. Upload screenshots of your new set-up to services like Facebook, Flickr, ipernity and Picasa, and post them to appropriate groups. Create screencasts and upload them to YouTube, Blip.tv, and Vimeo. Please tag posts and uploaded materials with "KDE". This makes them easy to find, and gives the KDE Promo Team a way to analyze coverage for the 4.12 releases.

Follow what is happening on the social web at the KDE live feed, buzz.kde.org. This site aggregates real-time activity from twitter, youtube, flickr, picasaweb, blogs and other social networking sites.