Today KDE released the first release candidate for its renewed Workspaces,
Applications, and Development
Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's
focus is now on fixing
bugs and further polishing new and old functionality. Compared to Beta2, RC1
contains hundreds of fixes. Please give this release another good round of
testing to help us release a rock-solid 4.8 in January.

Highlights of 4.8 include, but are not limited to:

* Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces -- Qt Quick is making its way into the
Plasma Workspaces, the new Plasma Components provide a standardized API
implementation of widgets with native Plasma Look and Feel. The device
notifier widget has been ported to using these components and is now written
in pure QML. KWin's window switcher is now also QML-based, paving the way for
newly designed window switchers.

* Dolphin's file view has been rewritten for better performance, scalability
and more attractive visual appearance.

* KSecretService optionally enables a shared password storage, therefore
making your saved passwords available to many other applicatios, leading to a
more secure system and better integration of non-KDE apps into the Plasma
Workspaces and KDE apps into non-Plasma workspaces.

* Many performance improvements and bugfixes improve the overall user
experience, making the KDE Applications and Workspaces more productive and fun
to use than ever before.

As usual, bugs can be reported, verified and found at bugs.kde.org.

The full announcement can be found at:
http://kde.org/announcements/announce-4.8-rc1.php