The new release cycle of KDE has commenced today with the revealing of KDE SC 4.12.0!

KDE Software Compilation 4.12.0 will be mainly about improving and polishing KDE Applications. The Plasma Workspace has been feature-frozen at the end of the 4.11 cycle. There is no new source tarball labeled “4.12” for kde-worlspace anymore, the KDE folk have stuck to the 4.11 tarball for inexplicable reasons… you may recall that the basis on which all of KDE is built, the KDE Platform, has been feature-frozen since 4.9 already. New features in the Platform are being implemented for the future KDE Frameworks 5.0 but nevertheless, a 4.12 tarball has been made available. I guess they are too smart for me, I do not understand this difference in versioning choice.

Anyway, KDE SC 4.12 (with kde-workplace 4.11) runs smoothly here.  I sure hope that KDE 4.12 will soon be added to Slackware-current (Slackware skipped 4.11 entirely). In the meantime, I built packages for you, on Slackware-current. I have not tested them on Slackware 14.1 and although they will probably just work, my focus for new KDE releases will be slackware-current as usual. If you want to be on the bleeding edge of KDE, you’ll have to follow Slackware’s bleeding edge as well.

What’s new in KDE 4.12?

KDE keeps an up-to-date feature plan page for the 4.12 release, as they do for every release past and future. Since the Workspace and Platform have been frozen, much activity is showing in the KDE Applications. Looking at that overview page, I want to check out Okular and Dolphin in any case. The graphical text editor Kate has been improved in areas of code completion and python support, which could make it an interesting choice for code developers. Especially so, since these Kate improvements trickle through in KDevelop which uses the Kate engine. I did not add kdevelop-4.6.0, anyone interested in case Slackware-current does not move soon?

And reading about Kwebkit, I guess I will have to renew the kwebkitpart package sometime soon because I seem to have missed a release.

The PIM suite had a lot of improvements (in speed and functionality) but to be honest I do not use KDE’s PIM software. Interesting to know in any case: According to a mailing list post by Vishesh Handa: there is a chance that Nepomuk will be replaced by Baloo, which performs better and avoids the data duplication currently seen in KDE (copies of the same data, think of emails, get replicated between nepomuk, akonadi and virtuoso leading to large homedirectory storage needs).

How to upgrade to KDE 4.12 ?

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 4.12 ?

Download locations are listed below (you will find the sources in ./source/4.12.0/ and packages in /current/4.12.0/ 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