The KDE Team has announced the release of KDE 4.8 RC2. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality. Please give this release another good round of testing to help us release a rock-solid 4.8 later this month.

In this version Dolphin's file view has been rewritten for better performance, scalability and more attractive visual appearance.

As we reported earlier, the KSecretService optionally enables a shared password storage, therefore making your saved passwords available to many other applicatios, leading to a more secure system and better integration of non-KDE apps into the Plasma Workspaces and KDE apps into non-Plasma workspaces.

Qt Quick is making its way into the Plasma Workspaces, the new Plasma Components provide a standardized API implementation of widgets with native Plasma Look and Feel. The device notifier widget has been ported to using these components and is now written in pure QML. KWin's window switcher is now also QML-based, paving the way for newly designed window switchers.