The KDE team has announced the 4.10 releases of KDE Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. It brings many improvements, features and polishes the UI even further, which already is one of the most polished, stable and mature desktop environments.

With this releae the Qt Quick framework has been deployed in many Plasma Workspace components. In general, consistency, stability and ease of use have been improved considerably.

For developers it is now easier to build widgets, entirely new Plasma Workspace layouts and other custom enhancements. Since the wallpaper engine has been updated to QML, it is easier to write animated wallpapers. From security point of view, the new QML-based screen locker makes Workspaces more secure.

• Read full review of KDE 4.10

KDE's saner Global Menu integration
With 4.10 KDE users can experience a much more sane global-menu like implementation without interrupting their workflow.

The new KDE appmenu enables a common menu for multiple applications running simultaneously. It has an option to display a top screen menubar—hidden by default—that appears when the mouse is moved near the top edge of the screen. The menubar follows the window focus so it can be used in multiscreen environments. There is also an option for the menu to be displayed as a sub-menu of a button in the window decoration. The menu can be displayed on the screen wherever the user wants it.

Better semantic search across desktop
KDE 4.10 introduces a new indexer, which makes indexing faster and more robust. One major improvements is that it first quickly indexes the basic information of new files (name and mimetype) so the files are available at once, and then delays full data extraction until the system is idle so you won't experience 'slow' system when it's indexing files. Unlike Ubuntu KDE continues to give users more power over their systems and search is no exception. Users can now disable indexing of Audio, Images, Documents, Video's and Source Code. The search and storage user interface and Backup have seen improvements as well. The introduction of the Tags KIO slave allows users to browse their files by tags from any KDE application.

Dolphin, the best file managers ever
There has been an impressive number of performance enhancements. Loading folders, both with and without previews, is significantly faster and requires less memory while using all available processor cores to be as fast as possible. Minor improvements were made to search, drag and drop and other areas. Dolphin also benefits from the improvements in the KDE semantic storage and search backend, reducing the resources needed for metadata handling.

Transferring files to and from a phone or other mobile device has become easier with support for MTP devices, which show up in the Places panel. The size of Panel icons can now be changed, and other usability and accessibility options have been added.

A detailed review of KDE 4.10 is coming soon. If you are a KDE user, you must join the KDE community on Google+.