14 DAY TRIAL // Now that the third and last maintenance update of the KDE Applications 16.04 software suite has debuted, it's time for us to take the Beta build of the next major KDE Applications release for a test drive.
Yes, that's right, we're talking about KDE Applications 16.08, the next major update of the suite of KDE applications that are mandatory for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment. And it looks like KDE Applications 16.08 Beta is now ready for public testing via the official channels of several GNU/Linux operating systems, and your help is needed to report bugs and other issues.
"With dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing," reads the announcement. "The KDE Applications 16.08 releases need a thorough testing in order to maintain and improve the quality and user experience. Actual users are critical to maintaining high KDE quality, because developers simply cannot test every possible configuration."
KDE Applications 16.08 coming on August 18, 2016
The development cycle of the KDE Applications 16.08 software suite will continue with a Release Candidate (RC) build, which will be available for public testing starting next week, on August 4, 2016. After that, the final release of KDE Applications 16.08 should hit the stable channels on August 18, and it looks like it will have the usual three maintenance updates.
The first one, KDE Applications 16.08.1, is scheduled to arrive on September 8, 2016, followed five weeks later by the second one, KDE Applications 16.08.2, on October 13. Finally, the last point release in the KDE Applications 16.08 series, KDE Applications 16.08.3, will be published on November 10, 2016, automatically setting the end of life of the branch.
If you're wondering what major changes KDE Applications 16.08 will bring, we can tell you right now that it should contain the akonadi-contacts, akonadi-mime, and akonadi-notes packages, ports the Cervisia, KolourPaint, KDF apps to KDE Frameworks 5, while dropping the mplayerthumbs, libkdeedu, kdepimlibs, kdesdk-strigi-analyzers, kdenetwork-strigi-analyzers, and kdegraphics-strigi-analyzer packages.
You can download the KDE Applications 16.08 Beta sources right now from the official channels, and you should be able to find binary packages for your GNU/Linux operating system on the main repositories. When testing the Beta of KDE Applications 16.08, please try to keep in mind that it's a pre-release version and that the kdesdk-kioslaves package does not build with libsvn 1.9 or later.