Back in December we were reporting that the first release candidate (RC1) of Linux Mint 8 “Helena” KDE Community Edition was released to the public. Today we announce that the development process of this operating system has come to an end. The final version of Linux Mint 8 “Helena” KDE Community Edition is now available for download.

The one to announce this milestone in the development process of Linux Mint 8 KDE was Lead Linux Mint Developer, Clem Lefebvre: “The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 8 “Helena” KDE Community Edition. The KDE Community Edition aims to provide a version of Linux Mint which uses the KDE desktop. A minimum of 4GB of free space and 256MB RAM are needed. For a comfortable experience we recommended to have at least 512MB RAM and 10GB of free space.”

To download the OS, check out the link at the bottom. But before you do that, here are the main bits and pieces you can expect to get from Linux Mint 8 KDE:

• - Based on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic koala, Linux 2.6.31 kernel, KDE 4.3.4 and Xorg 7.4
• - The graphical interface is now easier to use and it shows more content
• - The Update Manager will automatically inform the user when a new version of mintInstall-data is available. This way the user does not have to manually refresh the Software Manager.
• - Software Manager is aware of the APT status of each application.
• - The user can mark several applications for installation/removal.
• - The looks of the Update Manager have been improved.
• Update Manager now uses Synaptic to refresh the list of update. When Update Manager is visible, the user will see progress information on the screen.
• If a problem occurs, Update Manager displays an error message in the main window (previously the error message was displayed only in the logs).
• Software Sources tool can be accessed in the Edit menu (this is another Update Manager improvement).
• The user can define a list of packages for which updates will not be received. Wildcard characters can be used to define groups of package updates the user wants to ignore.
• Faster and more reliable update detection.
• The Windows compatibility layer installed by default.
• The software programs are installed by default as well: Minitube, Tucan, Google Widgets, Songbird, KDE partition manager, Guarddog.
• Network-manager-gnome replaces knetwork-manager
• Community editions use their own repositories
• Community editions can pin packages from the main edition.
• Mint tools are more modular they can now be installed without any configuration.

If you would like to get Linux Mint 8 KDE, you can download the Linux distro here.