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.
The KDE community has released Plasma 5.3, a major new release of the popular open source desktop environment. This latest release brings enhanced power management, better support for Bluetooth, and improved Plasma widgets. A technical preview of the Plasma Media Center shell is also available. In addition, Plasma 5.3 represents a step towards support for Wayland. There are also a few other minor tweaks and over 300 bugfixes.
That day has already come and passed; dubbed "KDE Frameworks 5" for the technology, and "Plasma 5" for the environment/applications, these technologies have been in circulation as technical demonstrations and alternatives for some months now. A combination of nervous anticipation and memories of being burned by the 4.0 releases lead all but the bravest to venture early and discover nothing nearly as painful as the transition between KDE 3 and Plasma. With KDE Plasma 5.2 being formally announced as the default environment of Kubuntu 15.04 due only months away, Frameworks 5 and Plasma have been recognised as maturing usable products - which means it's time to take a serious look at what to expect when you turn it on for the first time.
I am extremely impressed with the progress the KDE team has been making with 5.0. I can't wait until the 5.2 release hits. In any case, this is a very in-depth look at what the current state of KDE 5.x offers - grab a cup of coffee and enjoy.
KDE proudly announces the immediate availability of Plasma 5.0, providing a visually updated core desktop experience that is easy to use and familiar to the user. Plasma 5.0 introduces a new major version of KDE's workspace offering. The new Breeze artwork concept introduces cleaner visuals and improved readability. Central work-flows have been streamlined, while well-known overarching interaction patterns are left intact. Plasma 5.0 improves support for high-DPI displays and ships a converged shell, able to switch between user experiences for different target devices. Changes under the hood include the migration to a new, fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack centered around an OpenGL(ES) scenegraph. Plasma is built using Qt 5 and Frameworks 5.
This is a pretty major release, and while the cosmetic stuff isn't all cleaned up yet, I like the new design direction the team is taking - not a huge departure from what came before, but they seem to be making it look a little less... KDE-ish, if that makes any sense.
I'll be waiting on a few point releases, but I definitely want to try this out. I've always been a fan of KDE - stumbles notwithstanding - because it puts a lot of control in the user's hands to shape the user interface into what she wants. That's a very rare thing to come by these days, and we should cherish it.
The KDE Community is proud to announce KDE Frameworks 5.0. Frameworks 5 is the next generation of KDE libraries, modularized and optimized for easy integration in Qt applications. The Frameworks offer a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. There are over 50 different Frameworks as part of this release providing solutions including hardware integration, file format support, additional widgets, plotting functions, spell checking and more. Many of the Frameworks are cross platform and have minimal or no extra dependencies making them easy to build and add to any Qt application.
The release candidate for Plasma 5 has also been released.
And this is the second part of the future of KDE. We already covered part one.
This is the second half of the 'where KDE is going' write-up. Last week, I discussed what is happening with KDE's technologies: Platform is turning modular in Frameworks, Plasma is moving to new technologies and the Applications change their release schedule. In this post, I will discuss the social and organizational aspects: our governance.
This article explores where the KDE community currently stands and where it is going. Frameworks, Plasma, KDE e.V., Qt5, KDE Free Qt Foundation, QtAddons - you heard some of these terms and want to know what all the fuss is about? A set of articles on the Dot aims to bring some clarity in the changes and constants of the KDE community in 2014 and further. This is the first article, diving into the technical side of things: Plasma, applications and libraries.
KDE today releases the first Beta version of the next-generation Plasma workspace. The Plasma team would like to ask the wider Free Software community to test this release and give any feedback . Plasma Next is built using QML and runs on top of a fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack using Qt 5, QtQuick 2 and an OpenGL(-ES) scenegraph. Plasma Next provides a core desktop experience that will be easy and familiar for current users of KDE workspaces or alternative Free Software or proprietary offerings.
Plasma 2 Technology Preview demonstrates the current development status. The Plasma 2 user interfaces are built using QML and run on top of a fully hardware accelerated graphics stack using Qt5, QtQuick 2 and an OpenGL(-ES) scenegraph. Plasma 2 is a converged workspace shell that can run and switch between user interfaces for different formfactors, and makes the workspace adaptable to a given target device.
Plasma 2 is not a complete rewrite; it's a port to a new graphics system (a fully hardware accelerated OpenGL(ES) scenegraph).
According to a recent article on dot.kde.org, work is proceeding well on the modularization of KDElibs. Instead of being one large static library, KDElibs is being divided into a multi-tiered module system that consists of three framework categories.
These modules will be able to be used by any Qt application without the need to pull in unneeded code as was often the case with version 4 of KDElibs. This change from one large library to a set of smaller but interlinked modules has necessitated a name change from KDE Platform to KDE Frameworks for this aspect of the larger KDE Project.
From the article:
The Frameworks can be divided into three categories:
Functional elements have no runtime dependencies. For example, KArchive handles compression and decompression for many archive formats transparently and can be used as a drop-in library.
Integration designates code that requires runtime dependencies for integration depending on what the OS or platform offers. For example, Solid supplies information on available hardware features and may require runtime components to deliver some of the data on some platforms.
Solutions have mandatory runtime dependencies. For example, KIO (KDE Input/Output) offers a network-transparent virtual filesystem that lets users browse and edit files as if they were local, no matter where they are physically stored. And KIO requires kioslave daemons to function.
Modules may be written in such a way that they require only limited tiers of dependency chains. This should allow Qt application creators to use only the aspects of KDE that they find useful for their application. This modularization will allow for leaner, cleaner code and opens KDE technology to many more platforms than was previously practical; especially in the embedded and mobile markets.
If you would like to know more about the work on KDE Frameworks 5 the KDE.org article offers many useful links; including work with upstream, a roadmap, and current progress.
Gearing up for long term maintenance, Plasma Workspaces delivers further improvements to basic functionality with a smoother taskbar, smarter battery widget and improved sound mixer. The introduction of KScreen brings intelligent multi-monitor handling to the Workspaces, and large scale performance improvements combined with small usability tweaks make for an overall nicer experience.
This release marks massive improvements in the KDE PIM stack, giving much better performance and many new features. Kate improves the productivity of Python and Javascript developers with new plugins, Dolphin became faster and the educational applications bring various new features.
This release of KDE Platform 4.11 continues to focus on stability. New features are being implemented for our future KDE Frameworks 5.0 release, but for the stable release we managed to squeeze in optimizations for our Nepomuk framework.
That name.
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