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KDE Open Source Operating Systems Linux

KDE Releases Plasma 5 108

KDE Community (3396057) writes "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." sfcrazy reviewed the new desktop experience. It would appear the semantic desktop search features finally work even if you don't have an 8-core machine with an SSD.
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KDE Releases Plasma 5

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Last time i tried it was called nepomuk. Did they rename the process? :)

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It would appear the semantic desktop search features finally work even if you don't have an 8-core machine with an SSD.
    • they rewrote some kern part, called it baloo, now it's faster and still has mostly the same features... So just normal, if first try doesn't work, try it again....
  • I for one, (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cadeon ( 977561 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @09:32AM (#47466477)

    Thank our KDE developers for their hard work. I'm really impressed by KDE and have used it a lot over the years.

    • I also really appreciate the work the KDE developers have done over the years. I'll go look at KDE5 to see what's coming.

      However, I really Really REALLY hope they've found a way for you to install KDE and not have to have akonadi or nepomunk installed on my system. For the longest time, they've been force installed because of dependencies and I don't want them on my machine because I never use them and their daemons just suck up resources. Seems like there was something else like this, maybe amarok, but I
  • I love KDE, running it on all of my Linux systems, but WHO THE HELL comes up with these names? Nepomunk?? Baloo?? Silly names.. One thing: I see a PPA for Plasma 5 for KUbuntu.. umm.. how about for those of us who gave up Ubuntu and moved to the "mothership", namely Debian?? Would like to try Plasma 5 on my Debian Jessy laptop... but sure don't want to hoze up the current Plasma 4 install....

    • Re:Love KDE!! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by c6gunner ( 950153 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @09:47AM (#47466599) Homepage

      Would like to try Plasma 5 on my Debian Jessy laptop... but sure don't want to hoze up the current Plasma 4 install....

      BTRFS snapshot. Install. Try out. If you don't like it, copy BTRFS snapshot back to active.

      And if you're not using BTRFS ... why not?

      • From what I've heard btrfs is the bomb!! I'd love to try it.. but theres only so many hours in the day... Next time I build a machine from scratch I'll give it a try.. Not gonna try to migrate ext4 over (if its even possible).. THAT really would be "working without a net", I'd guess..

        • F2FS is also one quite sweet file system.
        • From what I've heard btrfs is the bomb!! I'd love to try it.. but theres only so many hours in the day...

          Yeah, took me a while to get around to trying it also. I'm very glad I did. Deduplication and snapshots are awesome features to have.

          . Not gonna try to migrate ext4 over (if its even possible).. THAT really would be "working without a net", I'd guess..

          Actually you can do an in-place conversion from ext4 to btrfs as long as the volume is unmonted (ie. boot off a CD or USB). It's pretty much instantaneous, and even provides you with a means to roll-back to ext4 if you're unhappy. You may have to update some boot files after though ... can't remember if I had to or not.

          Of course any filesystem conversion is inherently risk

      • by myrdos2 ( 989497 )
        I'm waiting for a stable release.
    • Re:Love KDE!! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Daemonik ( 171801 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @10:53AM (#47467259) Homepage

      The names are often from languages other than English, because Linux is developed internationally. Like how Wiki is Hawaiian and Ubuntu is Nguni Bantu.

      Nepomuk is a town in the Czech Republic and the name of a Saint. Baloo comes from Rudyard Kipling Anglicizing the Hindi word bhalu.

      So shut up with your whining. They're not hurting you.

    • thank god they don't call it KNepomunk, and KBaloo
  • As vain as it may be, I like my computer's interface to look nice. Plasma 4 was so ugly, with strangely clashing styles for the panels and the windows. This new bit of design makes it much more appealing to look at. I'm more of an AwesomeWM guy but I might give this a try on my laptop, just to see.
  • Gimp and firefox are the main programs that tie me to gtk+2/X11 but I'd be prepared to run those inside an a x-wayland container.

    • by armanox ( 826486 )

      Personally I don't care about Wayland, and I think the KDE developers share my sentiment - it's more important to work across platforms.

  • by pak9rabid ( 1011935 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @10:03AM (#47466741)
    Looks awesome guys. Keep up the great work!
  • by N7DR ( 536428 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @10:19AM (#47466919) Homepage

    Can someone who has tried this tell me whether two particular bugs that were present throughout the life of Plasma 4 have been fixed (OK, you may not think these are bugs, but I sure do: I can't imagine how they were ever allowed to persist, since to me they seem to violate pretty basic requirements of GUI behaviour):

    1. If one has a menu present (for example, by pressing the K-Menu button), does an incoming notification still cause the menu to disappear, so you get the delightfully random experience of clicking on whatever happened to be under the item you were about to click on?

    2. Can a single misbehaving plasmoid still cause the entire desktop to freeze? (This typically happens to me if the network connectivity is lost: poorly-written plasmoids that need network access can block and cause everything -- not just the plasmoid in question -- to freeze.)

    • 1. check the bug report you posted to see if its fixed. seems a bit of a whinge about nothing though. 2. again, check the bug report you posted to see ifs been fixed. this is a real bug if its real. not experienced it myself
    • by rdnetto ( 955205 )

      2. Can a single misbehaving plasmoid still cause the entire desktop to freeze? (This typically happens to me if the network connectivity is lost: poorly-written plasmoids that need network access can block and cause everything -- not just the plasmoid in question -- to freeze.)

      I believe this is no longer the case. One of the big changes in Plasma 5 was rewriting the process model used for plasmoids. That said, I can't find a source to confirm this, and am too lazy to download and run one of the Project Neon ISOs.

  • by Peter H.S. ( 38077 ) on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @10:29AM (#47467025) Homepage

    There is a somewhat detailed review of Plasma 5 here:
    http://www.themukt.com/2014/07... [themukt.com]

    The released videos seems very impressive.

    I really love KDE. I sometimes work on Mac OSX or MS Windows 7, and I must say KDE beats every other environment I have tried when it comes to flexible workflow and productivity.

    Whenever I work on other peoples computers, their personal files are always in a mess with their "Document" and "Download" folders loaded with hundreds of various files. I think this is simply because 1 panel file organizers like "Finder" or "Explorer" are really inefficient and hard to use for organizing and moving files. So I long for a twin panel file manager like Krusader, every time I work on other peoples machines.

    The way KDE functions are integrated is also a joy: right click on files for useful things as packing and unpacking, or attaching the files to an email etc. A really smart GUI for mass file renaming (in Krusader by krename) is incredible useful too.

    Looking forward to Plasma 5, probably included in Fedora 21.

  • Just installed and tried it. I don't see the "Switch to Classic Menu Style" option on the Application Launcher. I probably won't use it just for that.
    • by Teun ( 17872 )
      Indeed, a rather serious ommision for people like me who do't want to search or type for an application but just 'point' at it.

      Another little thing is the keyboard shortcuts don't seem to work but then maybe I should first reboot or log out and in again.

  • Meh, KDE really fucked me over in the 3.5->4 transition, getting rid of a bunch of features that I really liked.

    • well, you should have stayed on 3.5 until 4 was feature complete for you.
    • We officially rolled out centOS6 earlier this year, and we were hit hard by the transition from KDE3 to KDE4. In the end all we could do was either recommend that users either go to gnome, or switch to Trinity (KDE3 fork). I expect that we'll have similar challenges when transitioning to CentOS7 in 2 years unless KDE4 was fixed in CentOS7, except then we'll have challenges with both KDE4 and Gnome3.

  • If I'm copying a file and click the cancel button, will it remove the file it's writing to (like Mac and Windows), or does it still leave the incomplete destination file?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    KDE these days is decent, certainly a lot less buggy than on the early 4.0 releases. I just don't have any use for a desktop that heavy. The good thing about linux is that you have lots of choice, so I can run dwm and whine about bloatiness while KDE fans can run their desktop while mocking mine for being cryptic and tough to use.

    • by vurian ( 645456 )
      Your "desktop" isn't cryptic and touch to use: it just doesn't have the same feature set. The word "bloat" is the warning rattle that nature has given the incompetent to warn the rest of the world that their opinion has no technical basis and is, in fact, irrelevant.

Almost anything derogatory you could say about today's software design would be accurate. -- K.E. Iverson

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