The KDE community has announced the release today of KDE Applications 18.04 as the first major update to the open-source KDE application set for 2018.

KDE Plasma 5.13 will be starting up even faster, focusing more on Wayland improvements, improved monitor hot-plugging, GTK global menu support, and a lot of polishing throughout.

The latest monthly feature update to the KDE Frameworks collection of add-on libraries is now available. There's a lot of feature work to be found within today's KDE Frameworks 5.45.0 debut.

After being in development the past year, Elisa has done its first official release.

KDE Connect is the nifty KDE project providing allowing communication between your Linux desktop computer and your Android smartphone/tablet via a secure communication protocol. KDE Connect 1.3 is now the latest feature release.

With plans to officially ship KDE Applications 18.04 later this month, the release candidate is out today for this collection of K* applications.

For fans of Latte Dock, the KDE Plasma aligned desktop "dock", is out with a big development release ahead of the Latte Dock 0.8 release that will be coming up soon.

DigiKam 5.9.0 is now available for this KDE-aligned open-source photo management software.

Krita 4.0 is now available as the latest major release for this KDE-aligned, open-source digital painting program.

KDE contributor Nathaniel Graham is out with another recap of the usability and productivity improvements made this past week by the KDE community.

We have been tracking the development of Elisa, one of several KDE music players, since development started about one year ago. Following the recent alpha releases, the KDE Elisa 0.1 stable release is on the way.

KDE Connect is the exciting project that allows you to leverage your KDE desktop from Android tablets/smartphones for features like sending/receiving SMS messages from your desktop, toggling music, sharing files, and much more. KDE Connect does continue getting even better.

Purism is reporting they have been able to get KDE Plasma Mobile in its current development state running on their initial Librem 5 smartphone development platform.

KDE's KEXI database creator program that is akin to Microsoft Access is out with their first major release in months and also restores support for Microsoft Windows alongside Linux and macOS.

The KDE developers working on the Amarok music player released version 2.9.0 this week as their last expected release atop the aging KDE 4 libraries and Qt4.

For those relying upon GTK applications like LibreOffice, GIMP, and GNOME programs from the KDE desktop, the integration is taking a step forward with Plasma 5.13.

With Wayland not enforcing any standard for screensharing, KDE developers are now building off GNOME's approach of XDG-Desktop-Portal and PipeWire for desktop/screen sharing for adding this feature to Plasma on Wayland.

Development on KDE Plasma 5.13, KDE Applications 18.04, and KDE Frameworks 5.44 continues at full-speed.

KDiff3 is a long-time Qt-powered program for showing compares and merges between 2_ text files or directories. It's basically a nice graphically-driven diff viewer and has automatic merge abilities, Unicode handling, etc.

KDE's KScreen screen configuration tool is getting some nice improvements as part of the Plasma 5.13 development cycle.

Falkon 3.0 has been released today as the first version since its rebranding from QupZilla as an open-source, Qt-powered web-browser.

Adriaan de Groot continues working on improving the KDE stack for FreeBSD. The moment is finally near where KDE Plasma 5 along with the modern KDE Applications stack should soon be available via the FreeBSD Ports collection.

One of the nice elements of KDE Plasma 5.12 is that it starts up faster, particularly when running on Wayland, but with Plasma 5.13 it's looking like it will be an even faster experience getting to the Plasma desktop.

There is an experimental branch of KDE's KWin window manager / compositor with support for Vulkan compositing.

While Amarok was once KDE's dominant music player, it hasn't seen a new release now in about five years and has yet to see a release based on Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5. But there's hope that might still happen.

Today marks the release of KDE Frameworks 5.43, the latest monthly update to this set of add-on libraries complementing the functionality found in the Qt5 tool-kit.

If you are a KDE user and haven't yet upgraded to Plasma 5.12, you may want to do so soon, or one of the recent point releases -- especially if your system is potentially accessible by others to insert rogue flash/memory devices.

KMyMoney, the KDE personal finance manager program, has reached version 5.0 and with that big "5" release it's been ported to KDE Frameworks 5.

KDE Plasma 5.12.0 is now available that also serves as the second long-term support release for the Plasma 5 desktop.

There is no shortage of different KDE music/media player projects over the years but one of the most promising in recent times is Elisa. This week marks the second alpha release for the Elisa music player.