The KDE Windows team is delighted to announce the release of Windows packages from KDE Software Compilation 4.5.4. This release is doubly important because it returns the KDE Windows Initiative to the headlines after a lot of hard background work, and because it brings the some of the latest KDE software to Windows users.

Although still not considered stable and suitable for production work, this release brings to the table a lot of new improvements worth trying:

Support for two new compilers has also been added: mingw-w32, a more updated distribution of GCC for Windows provided by the mingw-w64 project, and vc100, the Microsoft compiler provided in Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition. These, in the future, will respectively replace mingw4 and vc90 (both of which are however supported in this release).

Aside from the software improvements mentioned above, the Windows team has worked under the hood to lower the barrier of contribution to development and community participation. This release itself is the result of a common release effort to fix the remaining compiling issues. The KDE on Windows team is quite proud of this common release effort and hopes to repeat it in the near future when Software Compilation 4.6 is released. We hope you'll "Join The (KDE Windows) Game" too!

Users can test this release by using the KDEWin Installer to try out all the software available. Included in this release are kdebase (both the applications and the workspace), kdeedu, kdegames, kdegraphics, kdemultimedia, kdenetwork, kdesdk, kdetoys, kdeutils, and several applications from extragear such as Amarok, digiKam and kipi-plugins, KMyMoney, Konversation, KMid, Kile and Quassel.

Be aware that some of the software may be unstable on Windows, but chances are good that you might find yourself quite comfortable in using some of these applications.