KDE 4.3, codenamed "Caizen," has had the goal "polish, polish, polish," according to its developers, who were scorned for beginning the KDE 4 series with a basic 4.0 release that did not have all the features of the 3.5.x predecessors.

With this release being the , the momentum and pace of development is definitely increasing with some 2000 feature requests implemented in the past six months alone.

Other statistics from development team indicate 10,000 bugs fixed and approximately 63,000 changes committed by nearly 700 .

All that has led to 4.3 being one of the most anticipated free software releases this year.

Technical highlights of 4.3 include better integration between Plasma, KDE's desktop interface and KWin, the window and compositing manager which allows theme sharing and it is also possible to have separate sets of Plasma widgets and wallpapers on each virtual desktop.