The KDE project has announced the release of first beta for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform 4.10.

Post this release the team will now focus on bug fixing and further polishing new and old functionality as the API, dependency and feature freezes is already in place.

So, what's new in KDE SC 4.10?
With this release KDE is introducing a brand new Screen Locker, a new screen locking mechanism, which is based on QtQuick brings and offers more flexibility and security to Plasma Desktop. It also introduces a new print manager which makes improves setting up of printers and monitoring jobs.

Some other major improvements are:

Qt Quick in Plasma Workspaces -- Qt Quick is continuing to make its way into  the Plasma Workspaces. Plasma Quick, KDE's extensions on top of QtQuick allow  deeper integration with the system and more powerful apps and Plasma  components. Plasma Containments can now be written in QtQuick. Various Plasma  widgets have been rewritten in QtQuick, notably the system tray, pager,  notifications, lock & logout, weather and weather station, comic strip and  calculator plasmoids.

Animated Wallpapers -- Thanks to a new QtQuick-based wallpaper engine, animated wallpapers are now much easier to create.

Faster indexing -- A new indexer allows the Nepomuk semantic engine faster  indexing of files. The new Tags kioslave allows users to browse their files by  tags in any KDE-powered application.

Notifications -- Plasma's notifications are now rendered using QtQuick,  notifications themselves, especially concerning power management have been cleaned up.

Improved Zooming in Okular -- A technique called tiled rendering, which internally splits up the document in parts and only renders visible parts  allows Okular to zoom in much more while reducing memory consumption. Okular  Active, the touch-friendly version of the powerful document reader is now part  of KDE SC.

At the moment Arch Linux, Gentoo Linux and Chakra are offering 4.10 (or 4.9.80) through unstable repos for testing. It is expected that these packages will soon be available for openSUSE and Kubuntu so more users will be able to test it and help the team in bug crushing. [If it's already available for these two distributions, let us know].