The first release candidate of the upcoming KDE SC 4.4 has been made available today. This is the first of two release candidates that is being planned. The second release candidate is being planned for 20th January and the final release on 9th February.

Some of the important changes of 4.4 over 4.3 are as given below:

• Improved Nepomuk Semantic Search
• New KAuth authorization framework to handle privilege escalation.
• New applications like Blogilo, which is a blogging client, and Cantor and Rocs, which are scientific tools, have been added.
• Plasmoids can now be shared with other users over a network.

As of now, only the binary is available and no distro specific packaging has been done. However, if you are feeling adventurous, you might compile it yourself from source.