It is not news that openSUSE, through to the effort of the openSUSE community KDE team, offers several third-party repositories for those who want the latest software from KDE. Since a while, stable releases were offered in the KDE:Release:4x repositories, created with every major release of KDE software. These were meant to offer the latest and greatest to the users without having them to track KDE:Distro:Factory, which is instead used to track packaging for the next openSUSE release and is more in a state of flux.

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).

In the past few days, the openSUSE KDE team has been working hard, following the footsteps of the nice work done by the Kubuntu and Arch Linux communities, to provide Qt5 packages for the distribution. In fact, work was already done in the past, but the packages were not coinstallable with the existing Qt4 installation. Thanks to a renewed effort, the OBS holds now Qt5 packages that won’t overwrite the existing Qt4 install: they currently live in the KDE:Qt51 repository (Factory and openSUSE 12.

The latest release of the KDE Platform, Workspaces, and Applications (4.11) is around the corner: in fact, the last RC was recently made available. We’re almost there, but it doesn’t mean that testing and reporting should stop: on the contrary, it is needed even more to ensure that no bad bugs crawl up in the final release. As part of this effort, openSUSE packages for RC2 have been released through the OBS, and are available in the KDE:Distro:Factory repository.

The latest release from KDE moved from beta to RC stage, thus finding and reporting bugs is more important that ever. At the same time, the distribution packaging teams are also working in polishing their packages. As far as openSUSE is concerned (not dissing other distros, just mentioning the one I’m involved in ;), you can kill two birds with one stone by installing the packages provided in the KDE:Distro:Factory repository.

As a consequence of [the recent changes in the repositories]({{ site.url }}/2013/06/upcoming-changes-to-opensuse-kde-repositories), the openSUSE KDE team is happy to announce the availability of packages containing the first beta of the KDE Platform, Workspaces and Applications 4.11. Packages are available in the KDE:Distro:Factory repository. As it is beta software, it may have not-yet-discovered bugs, and its use is recommended only if you are willing to test packaging (reporting bugs to Novell’s bugzilla) or the software (reporting bugs directly to KDE).

These posts kind of sound like a broken record, right? ;) Anyway, since KDE has released new versions of Platform, Workspaces and Applications as part of the stable release cycle, thanks to the OBS we have packages available for openSUSE 12.2 and 12.3. The 4.10.4 update will also be released as an official update for 12.3 in due time. Where you can get the packages? Two places, as usual: KDE:Distro:Factory in case you are interested in contributing to packaging for the next openSUSE release; KDE:Release:410 (openSUSE 12.

KDE has released its monthly update for the 4.10 release, and after a brief wait while the Open Build Service worked over the released tarballs, the openSUSE KDE team is pleased to announce the availability of the 4.10.2 release packages for openSUSE 12.2 and 12.3. []({{ site.url }}/images/2013/04/757111961.png) Despite being a minor release, more than 100 bugs were fixed, in particular there were many KDEPIM fixes touching both the low level stack and KMail/KAddressbook/Kontact.