Right before Christmas, KDE has published the first candidate for the upcoming release of KDE Platform, Plasma and Applications 4.6. The focus at this stage is on fixing bugs and completing translations and artwork. As such, the rework of the Oxygen icon set is nearing completion, many bugs reported by testers in recent weeks have been fixed and stabilization is still in full swing.

KDE's release team has decided to not include the new release of KDE's PIM suite, containing the Kontact groupware client and the new KMail 2 which is based on the Akonadi groupware cache in this release due to open issues with migration of large sets of data from the traditional client. These bugs are being worked on as we speak, but the risk at this point is too high to include the new Kontact in the 4.6.0 release. Therefore, it has been decided to release KMail 2 and its companions together with one of the subsequent 4.6 releases, likely 4.6.1 one month later. A 3rd beta version of the KDE-PIM module is available already.

As the other components of the frameworks, workspaces and applications are nearing release date, KDE encourages testers to give their favorite software some final thorough testing. The last chance for feedback will be the second release candidate, planned for 5th January 2011. The final release of 4.6.0 will be available on January, 26th 2011.