Today, Sebastian Kügler of KDE fame, announced the release of KDE 4 RC 1, codenamed “Calamity.”

While the final bits of Plasma, the brand new desktop shell and panel in KDE 4, are falling into place, the KDE community decided to publish the first release candidate for the KDE 4.0 Desktop. Release Candidate 1 is the first preview of KDE 4.0 which is suitable for general use and discovering the improvements that have taken place over the entire KDE code base. The KDE Development Platform, the basis for developing KDE applications, is frozen and is now of release quality. (Kügler)

Jonathan Riddell and Terence Simpson have been working hard today backporting this latest release into Gutsy. Some of you may be wondering where Beta 4 was, and due to a bug in the PPA (Personal Package Archive), we were unable to get a new package to build against universe. That has since been taken care of.

For you Foresight Linux users, I am currently in the process of working on KDE 4 RC 1 packages for fl:2-devel. Hopefully within the next couple of days, you will be able to run:

$ sudo conary update kdebase-runtime=kde.rpath.org@kde:4-devel

I have been running KDE 4 full-time now for the past few weeks and I have to say it is really shaping up nicely. I have only witnessed a handful of crashes and quite a few of annoyances that I have to get used to. Other than that, congrats to everyone who has been working their arse off shaping the future of KDE 4. Thanks!

UPDATE: KDE 4 RC 1 for Gutsy are available!