KDE has made the first release candidate of the KDE Software Compilation 4.4 available. The new features of KDE SC 4.4.0 can be found in the official release announcement. A more detailed list is available on TechBase. Please report bugs you find in this release to KDE's Bugzilla.

The first KDE SC (KDE SC, what's that?) release (albeit not a stable one) is the first release candidate for the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.4.0 which will be released on February 9th. In between, there is a second release candidate planned already, RC2, on 20th January. In the 4.4 beta cycle, we have reduced the time it takes us to package and deliver the test releases, so our testers get the freshest tarballs ever, leading to shorter test-and-fix cycles. KDE SC 4.4.0 is also the first release to be based on Qt 4.6 which became available in December. We have therefore decided to insert another release candidate to make sure we deliver the best KDE Software Compilation to date with KDE SC 4.4.0.

As usual, the source tarballs can be downloaded from various mirrors, spread across the world. Packages for a number of distros will become available shortly, as the packages are still very fresh, and not everybody has had the chance to fully build them yet.

This release candidate is named after Cornelius Schumacher, in order to worship his continued awesomeness and his contributions to KDE as a whole.