This release of Plasma brings many nice touches for our users such as much improved high DPI support, KRunner auto-completion and many new beautiful Breeze icons. It also lays the ground for the future with a tech preview of Wayland session available. We’re shipping a few new components such as an Audio Volume Plasma Widget, monitor calibration tool and the User Manager tool comes out beta.
There’s a video too.
I was happily using Kubuntu 14.10 until I had to move to the next version, because not even security updates were available; so I had to move to Kubuntu 15.04 and thus to KDE 5.x.
In my experience it’s so immature, I had to abandon KDE and instead learn to use Cinnamon.
What caused me to leave KDE after 8 uninterrupted years?
– My current keyboard layout (US-Intl with dead keys) was completely changed; for instance, for typing the letter á I had to use [Alt-Gr] + [a] instead of ‘a
– Alt-Tab behaviour was also f_cked up
– Many other oddities (like missing the many nice panel widgets in 4.x)
I still remember the painful transition from KDE 3.x to 4.x — perhaps I’ll have to wait until it’s usable.
I’m very thankful for the KDE team for providing a wonderful desktop experience throughout these years. But for the time being, I won’t use KDE 5.x.
Although Cinnamon has also its oddities, at least it’s stable enough.
Edited 2015-08-26 18:18 UTC
Maybe you configured your keyboard incorrectly. You can always change the layout and the key placement.
I have been KDE 4 user but having tiling with gnome was a very well integrated feature for me (through extensions) that I switched to gnome for now but I have been using KDE plasma 5 for some time and I think it’s a winner if the extensions that I was using catch up. In my opinion (someone who customize the shit out of keyboard and everything else) KDE is more productive.
It might not be the most objective argument. But KDE 5 is the first desktop for years which looks very beautifull and polished en logical but not over simplified.
The aplication starter is very goodlooking. Looks logic to me and finally something fullscreen. KDE 4 had something familiar and I used it with pleasure on a laptop with touchscreen.
In a 1 minute video I learned a lot. It looks “an awful lot” like Windows 8 and a dash of spotlight. I don’t have any problem with copying good ideas from others, but that volume control….looks like it is identical to Windows 10
Looks good, looks fast, looks functional…I like it!
Can I run all of this on Windows as well or is this a Linux-only part of KDE?