14 DAY TRIAL // The KDE Community has just announced that KDE Applications 15.08 has been released, which marks the start of a new cycle for this important part of the KDE project.
Even if all the glamour and fame goes to the Plasma desktop, KDE Applications and KDE Frameworks play an important role in the entirety of the project. In fact, if we take a closer look at KDE Applications 15.08, we'll see that it's actually full of all kind of interesting stuff that will soon hit all the distros that incorporate KDE as their desktop environment.
Not all of the developers have been quick to adopt the latest KDE components, but they are slowly gaining ground. In fact, some distributions even added KDE Plasma 5.4 Beta before it reached a stable stage. This is not a maintenance upgrade, and it comes with some pretty interesting new features and options, so make sure that you keep a close eye on the repositories.
Porting apps to KDE Frameworks 5 is still a priority
The developers of the apps that are included in the KDE project have been working very hard in the past few months to port everything to the new KDE Frameworks 5.x. It was a difficult journey, and not everything is ready, but the vast majority have taken this step.
"With this release a total of 107 applications have been ported to KDE Frameworks 5. The team is striving to bring the best quality to your desktop and these applications. So we're counting on you to send your feedback. With this release there are several new additions to the KDE Frameworks 5-based applications list, including Dolphin, the Kontact Suite, Ark, Picmi, etc." the devs said in the official announcement.
If you don't find the packages available in the repositories, you can always download the source from the official KDE website and compile it yourself, although that’s not really recommended unless you know what you're doing. It's a very complex piece of software, and it takes some expertise to install it manually.