The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks that the majority of the components of KDE 4.0 are now approaching release quality.
While the final bits of Plasma, the brand new desktop shell and panel in KDE 4, are falling into place, the KDE community decided to publish a first release candidate for the KDE 4.0 Desktop. Release Candidate 1 is the first preview of KDE 4.0 which is suitable for general use and discovering the improvements that have taken place all over the KDE codebase.
At the same time, the KDE team releases the final version of the KDE Development Platform, which provides the needed libraries and applications the KDE Desktop is based on. The KDE Development Platform, comprising the basis for developing KDE applications, is frozen and is now of release quality. The sourcecode for the KDE Development Platform can be found in the "stable/" subdir on KDE's FTP server and mirrors.
Building on this, the majority of applications included in KDE 4.0 are now usable for day to day use. The KDE Release Team has recently underlined this by calling on the community to participate in reporting bugs during the time remaining before the release of KDE 4.0 in December.
Meanwhile, preparations for the KDE 4.0 release events are taking place, with the main event taking place in Mountain View, California in the USA in January 2008. Make sure you don't miss it!
http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-4.0-rc1.php