4.13 Beta 1 Workspaces, Platform and Applications for openSUSE: start the testing engines!

Yesterday KDE released their first beta of the upcoming 4.13 version of Workspaces, Applications and Development platform. As usual with the major releases from KDE, it’s packed with a lot of “good stuff”.  Giving a list of all the improvements is daunting, however there are some key points that stand out:

• Searching: KDE’s next generation semantic search is a prominent feature of this release. It’s several orders of magnitude faster, much leaner on memory and generally is a great improvement from the previous situation (this writer has been testing it for the past months and he’s absolutely delighted about it).

• PIM: Aside with tight integration with the new search feature, KMail gained a new quick filter bar and search, many fixes in IMAP support (also thanks to the recent PIM sprint) and a brand new sieve editor.

• Okular has a lot of new features (tabs, media handling and a magnifier)

• A lot more ;)

Given all of this, could the openSUSE KDE team stay still? Of course not! Packages are available in the KDE:Distro:Factory repository (for openSUSE 13.1 and openSUSE Factory) as there are lot of changes and need more testing. The final release will be provided also in the KDE:Relase413 repository (which will be created then).

Some notes on the search changes: you will need to migrate existing data from Nepomuk (should you want to: it’s optional). You can do that by running “nepomukbaloomigrator” when Nepomuk is running: it will automatically migrate your data and switch off the old system (virtuoso-t included). Also bear in mind that since the old Nepomuk support is considered “legacy” (but still provided), the programs that have not yet been ported to the new architecture have their Nepomuk integration disabled. One significant regression is file-activity linking, which will not work.

As usual, this is an unstable release and it is only meant for testing. Don’t use this in production environments! If you encounter a bug, if it is packaging related use Novell’s Bugzilla, otherwise head to bugs.kde.org. Also, before reporting anything, please check out the Beta section of the KDE Community Forums first.

That’s all, enjoy this new release!