The KDE Project has announced the release of KDE 4.4 packages for Windows, reports OStatic. The packages allow Windows users to install KDE applications such as digiKam, Amarok and Konversation natively on Windows. The developers of KDE say that introducing Windows users to KDE applications is a lot easier than getting them to switch to a Linux distro entirely. Obviously the long term objective is to get users used to open source alternatives before making the switch to an all-Linux desktop.

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The KOffice team today announced the second beta of the upcoming 2.1 release. The KOffice community has now switched from adding new features to only fix the remaining bugs, and that is obvious from this release. The first beta of 2.1 was released without any fanfares, but it marked the transition into the bugfixing stage.

Something that is not obvious from the changelog is that there has been much activity in the MS office import filters, especially for MS Word and Powerpoint. Many new formatting features have been implemented in both these filters. We expect KOffice 2.1 to be better at reading MS file formats than any previous KOffice version.

See the announcement and changelog.

Starting with the 11.2 release in November OpenSuse’s default desktop will be KDE. Previously OpenSuse shipped with Gnome set as the default desktop, with KDE also available. Now that decision has been reversed and users installing OpenSuse using the defaults will install a KDE desktop. OpenSuse will also include the Gnome desktop but it will not be set as the default desktop to be installed. Read the rest of this entry →