The developers behind the KDE project have released version 4.8 of the open source desktop environment. The minor release brings a number of new features and technical improvements to the KDE platform, desktop shell, and application stack.

The Plasma Workspace has been undergoing an overhaul to take advantage of QML, a declarative user interface development framework that is part of Nokia's open source Qt toolkit. Several parts of the Plasma environment, such as the device status notification system and the splash screen, have been updated to use QML.

QML has also been adopted to power some new features in KWin, such as the much-improved keyboard window switcher, which is now configurable and supports several visual styles. The KDE developers are building a specialized Qt Quick Components widget set for Plasma, which was introduced in this release and will make it easier for Plasmoid creators to adopt QML.

A number of programs in the KDE application stack also got noteworthy improvements. KMail got an architectural overhaul and Dolphin has a new display engine that is said to be more efficient.

On the platform side of the KDE software collection, there's a new password management framework called KSecretService that is designed to conform with the Secret Service API, a new cross-desktop password management standard that was drafted through FreeDesktop.org. This means that GNOME and KDE are finally on a path towards having fully interoperable password managers.

Kubuntu 11.10 users who want to get their hands on 4.8 can obtain it from the backports PPA.