KDE today announced the immediate availability of a second set of beta releases for the upcoming 4.6 series. These releases, codenamed Caramel, bring previews of new versions of the Plasma Desktop and Plasma Netbook workspaces as well as introducing major changes to applications and the KDE Platform.

Since the first set of beta releases two weeks ago 1318 bugs have been reported and 1176 bugs have been closed. Thank you to our testers and developers working on making the final releases shine!

Well, that looks promising, but more testing (and helping us fix issues!) is needed. So here is another snapshot for you to grind your teeth on. In particular, we invite further testing of Kontact and its individual applications as they complete the transition to the Akonadi storage framework.

The usual boilerplate applies as well: these beta releases do not meet production quality requirements and should be regarded as suitable for testing purposes only.