KDE 4.11 Beta 1
Ed ecco giungere fra noi KDE 4.11 Beta 1 ovvero la prima beta del ramo della futura KDE 4.11 che verrà rilasciato in versione stabile il 14 di Agosto 2013 (in piena estate bollente). Questa nuova versione di KDE prosegue nell'implementare Qt Quick nei vari elementi del DE. Uno dei widget più importanti ovvero il task manager è stato riscritto in Plasma Quick. Potenziato anche il widget per la batteria che ora mostra le informazioni di tute le batterie (come quella del mouse o della tastiera senza fili).

Il particolare del widget della batteria di KDE 4.11 che come potete vedere mostra le info sulla batteria del mouse e consente di gestire anche la tastiera
Migliorata l'indicizzazione di Nepomuk che ora risulta più veloce.
L'altra grande novità, di cui però gli utenti beneficeranno in futuro, è l'aggiunta del supporto (sperimentale) per Wayland in KWin.
Ma leggiamo le info di questo rilascio (in lingua inglese che mi scoccio a tradurre alla lettera tutto):

  • Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces—Qt Quick is continuing to make its way into the Plasma Workspaces. Plasma Quick, KDE"s extensions on top of Qt Quick, allow deeper integration and more powerful apps and Plasma components. One of the central Plasma widgets, the task manager, was completely rewritten in Plasma Quick. It got quite a few bug fixes on its way to the new QML version. The Battery widget was overhauled. It now shows information about all the batteries (e.g. mouse, keyboard) in a system. And the battery icons can now show a finer-grained load-status.
  • Faster Nepomuk indexing—The Nepomuk semantic engine received massive performance optimizations (e.g., reading data is 6 or more times faster). Indexing happens in two stages: the first stage retrieves general information (such as file type and name) immediately; additional information like MP3 tags, author information and similar is extracted in a second, somehow slower stage. Metadata display is now much faster. In addition, the Nepomuk backup and restore system was improved. The system also got new indexers for documents like odt or docx.
  • Kontact improvements—Kontact got a faster indexer for its PIM data with improvements to Nepomuk, and a new theme editor for email headers. The way it handles email images now allows it to resize pictures on the fly. The whole KDE PIM suite got a lot of bug fixes, such as the way it deals with Google Calender resources. The PIM Import Wizard allows users to import settings and data for Trojita (the Qt IMAP email client) and all other importers were improved as well.
  • KWin and Path to Wayland—Intial experimental support for Wayland was added to KWin. KWin also got many OpenGL improvements including support being added for creating an OpenGL 3.1 core context and robustness from using the new functionality provided by the GL_ARB_robustness extension. Numerous KWin optimizations are aimed at reducing CPU and memory overhead in the OpenGL backend. Some desktop effects have been re-written in JavaScript to ease maintenance.