This is a cross-post from our sister site OMG! Suse! written by rTyler.
Hold onto your hats! The KDE team just announced the release of KDE 4.5.0, the most recent release of the already awesome KDE suite. This iteration of the desktop environment includes updates to the developer platform, KDE’s applications and the core desktop experience, all contributing to a very important release for the KDE community.
KDE 4.5 will be available via Kubuntu Backports well in time for Maverick come October with all of your favourite Ubuntu additions but, in the meantime, what’s a little KDE eye candy between friends?
Behold, the KDE 4.5 Plasma Netbook Workspace
The most subtle but impactful change is the inclusion of WebKit in the KDE platform. Those not versed on KDE history might not remember the creation of the WebKit project, which itself was derived from "KHTML", the ultra-fast and innovative rendering engine that powers Konqueror. 
Back in the day, after much gnashing of teeth in the open source community, Apple cleaned up their act with regard to their fork of the KHTML project and founded WebKit. The project has advanced tremendously since then becoming one of the most widely used web rendering engines on the planet, powering browsers like Safari for Mac OS X and Google Chrome. All the improvements made in the WebKit project over the past eight years are now available to KDE users through Konqueror.
While the addition of WebKit to the mix is huge, it’s not the only performance improvement in this release of KDE. For brevity’s sake, I won’t go into the other changes which are detailed here if you’re curious.
So much for the underpinnings! How good looking is KDE 4.5.0 you may be thinking, it’s very good looking (I might go as far as to say "purty")! The Plasma Workspace has been cleaned up in a number of ways, most notable the notification area is more polished in this release which sports fancy monochromed icons for the tray