The new major release of KDE 4 has been made available. KDE Software Compilation 4.14.0 is the first of four iterations which will all see the light of day this year, 2014 (KDE 4.14.3 will be released on 11 November). A relatively short cycle, caused by the parallel development towards Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5. What’s still missing for Plasma 5 is the KDE Application ports to Qt5 and the Frameworks and this is where most of the action is nowadays. There is nothing really worthwhile to mention about KDE 4.14 if you look at its feature plan. Nevertheless KDEPIM is being worked on a lot and judging by the activities in the applications’ GIT repositories everybody is still alive and kicking out code. The previously mentioned announcement page has more details about the individual application improvements.

Anyway, like I said: even though this is a new major release, it is more a polishing update to the KDE Applications. That did not restrain me from building new KDE 4.14 packages on Slackware-current. I was out of the country this week (my son is glad about the freedom that gives him around the house …) so the release of my new packages was somewhat delayed, but now that I returned I am going to fulfill my promise and create KDE 4.13 packages for Slackware 14.1 somewhere during the next week.

Akonadi is the only dependency that was upgraded after my KDE 4.13 packages. The KDE 4.14 package-set uses two sources from previous major releases because no new tarball was made available for KDE 4.14. Those are: kactivities-4.13.3 and kde-workspace-4.11.11.

How to upgrade to KDE 4.14.0 ?

You will find all the installation/upgrade instructions that you need in the accompanying README file. That README also contains basic information for KDE recompilation using the provided SlackBuild script.

You are strongly advised to read and follow these installation/upgrade instructions!

Where to find packages for KDE 4.14.0 ?

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/4.14.0/ and packages in /current/4.14.0/ subdirectories). Using a mirror is preferred because you get more bandwidth from a mirror and it’s friendlier to the owners of the master server!

Have fun! Eric