Today KDE released the first beta for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality. Highlights of 4.8 include, among other things:

Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces -- Qt Quick is making its way into the Plasma Workspaces, the new Plasma Components provide a standardized API implementation of widgets with native Plasma Look and Feel. The device notifier widget has been ported using these components and is now written in pure QML. KWin's window switcher is now also QML-based, paving the way for newly designed window switchers.

Dolphin's file view has been rewritten for performance, scalability and more attractive visual appearance.

Many performance improvements and bugfixes improve the overall user experience, making the KDE Applications and Workspaces more productive and fun to use than ever before.