Submitted by Members of the Plasma team have been working hard to continue making Plasma a lightweight and responsive desktop which loads and runs quickly, but remains full-featured with a polished look and feel. We have spent the last four months optimising startup and minimising memory usage, yielding faster time-to-desktop, better runtime performance and less memory consumption. Basic features like panel popups were optimised to make sure they run smoothly even on the lowest-end hardware. Our design teams have not rested either, producing beautiful new integrated lock and login screen graphics.
Read the entire release announcement for more details.
I left KDE behind when version 4 came out as I found it buggy and lacking in comparison to 3.5.
With the good reports coming through lately though I’m currently downloading the KDE spin of Manjaro ready to give it a whirl.
If I find it a good fit it will replace my Manjaro XFCE which is ready for a reinstall on a bigger drive anyhow.
4.0 “it’s not for general use” was where they lost me. Lately I’ve been looking at it again, and seeing a bunch of apps that never made it from KDE4 to KDE5. Then this article with a single comment. Hardly any major distros running it by default. It’s sad. 3.5 was my desktop for a long time and I loved it and it really seems like it’s circling the drain now. lxqt seems to be running on fumes too
Not a great time for Qt centered DEs
> Hardly any major distros running it by default
People end up realizing that it’s better to have a few major distro running it by default than a lot of minor distros.
For example, with Kubuntu you can have commercial support (http://kubuntu.emerge-open.com/buy), and you can buy computers with preinstalled Kubuntu (like the ones from ZaReason or ThinkPenguin). We can’t achieve this with a lot of minor distros.
So this is explainable:
Kubuntu rollouts include the world’s largest Linux desktop deployment, that includes more than 500,000 desktops in Brazil (in 42,000 schools of 4,000 cities)
http://web.archive.org/web/20130402015944/events.linuxfoundation.or…
http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kubuntu-to-be-sponsored-by-blue-systems
https://blogs.kde.org/2011/09/16/42000-schools-running-kubuntu-deriv…
https://lwn.net/Articles/635613/
Edited 2018-06-17 15:10 UTC
> Then this article with a single comment.
Also, this article was recommended 7 times, which is a lot on this site.
I tried to recommend it, but said “Sorry, you can only recommend stories for the first 3 days after they are published.”
Though the links you provide are relatively old …which can as well be used to argue that indeed the interest in KDE is waning.
And the best stats we have, from Wikimedia from 2015 ( https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSys… – which show some KDE-focused distros; on newer stats: https://analytics.wikimedia.org/dashboards/browsers/#all-sites-by-os there’s only SUSE, but it registers only at the very beginning of the graph in 2015 ), paint a rather bleak picture for KDE – Kubuntu, SUSE, Mandriva had minuscule fraction of Ubuntu…