I’m not going to make a detailed post, just a screen-shot based overview of the new features you can expect in KDE 4.5.

Cascading popups

There was a lot of talk in the beginning about why Kickoff and Lancelot are not like the classic menu - and don’t have popups. Although I still don’t consider cascading popups to be good, liblancelot supports them. After a large amount of polishing, the feature is ready to be exposed in the menu itself. It is considered experimental, but it works quite well.

How to activate: Configure Lancelot Menu > Applications > Open popups for subcategories

This feature is not yet enabled for the Shelf applet (ex Lancelot Parts) but it still may find its way into it for 4.5.

Smaller section buttons.

How to activate: Right-click any of the section buttons and choose “Make buttons narrower”

Search history

Lancelot now remembers what you have typed in the search box, and auto-completes your query.

How to activate: Start typing - the closest match will already be in the search box, grayed out a bit. To use the whole completion, press End key. For completing smaller parts, press right arrow key.

Search engines (runners) configuration

Now, you can choose which runners to enable and which ones to disable. You can disable the slow or crashy ones, …

How to activate: Configure Lancelot Menu > Search

Other stuff

Nice animations and better Plasma-feel.

New icon

Akonadi based unread messages

Disk usage pie-charts

Reduced memory footprint

A lot of fixes…

That’s all for now…