Features Being Brewed For KDE 4.10

The soft feature freeze for KDE 4.10 is coming up in just two weeks time. In this article are a look at some of the features being worked on for the KDE 4.10 desktop update.

The KDE 4.10 release schedule sets the feature freeze on 25 October, the hard feature freeze on 8 November, a beta for the 21 November, the release candidates begin in mid-December, and the final release is planned to happen on 23 January 2013.

Features being worked on for this next major bi-annual KDE Software Compilation update include:

- A KIO-Slave for MTP, the Media Transfer Protocol. MTP is a Microsoft specification for transferring of files to audio/media players and other mobile devices. The KIO access work for MTP support is a work in progress and will allow for things like accessing a Galaxy Nexus and other MTP-enabled smart-phones from the Dolphin file manager without having to resort to other means for the MTP support under Linux.

- A new QML-based screen-locker for ksmserver, the KDE Session Manager.

- Porting notifications and task manager applets along with Kickoff to QML.

- A new print manager KCM and Plasmoid replacement in C++.

- Various new plug-ins, features, and a plotting framework when it comes to the KDE educational packages.

- A major clean-up and rewrite of the KDE games library.

- Porting libkipi of the KDE graphics stack to KDE-XML GUI.

- Juk is finally being moved away from kde3support.

- Facebook support for the KDE PIM will now be supported by default.

- A QML version of the Microblog KDE Plasma add-on.

- Various Okteta enhancements in the KDE SDK area.

- Proper AMD Catalyst driver support in KWin.

These tentative KDE 4.10 features, many of which are still being worked on, are listed on techbase.kde.org. With many of them being still marked as "TODO" or "In progress", not all of them might end up making the cut for the KDE 4.10 release. This feature list also isn't fully exhaustive but more KDE 4.10 desktop features will be covered in future Phoronix articles.