2015/12/8 KDE has released an important update to its desktop software: Plasma 5.5.
In the past four months, we have worked hard to polish the product smoothly, add new workflows to it, make Plasma more beautiful than ever, and lay a solid foundation for the future.
Updated Breeze Plasma theme
The Breeze Plasma widget theme now looks more harmonious.
The Breeze icon theme adds some new icons, updates the original icons, and improves the visual design.
Plasma widget manager
The Plasma widget manager now supports two-column views, with new widget icons for the Breeze, Breeze Dark and Oxygen themes.
Extended functionality on the Application Launcher
The right-click menu on the Application Launcher ('Kickoff') now lists documents recently opened in the application, allowing editing of the application's menu items and adding the application to the panel, Task Manager or desktop superior. "Favorites" can now favorite documents, directories, system actions, etc. They can also be created from search results. These features (and others), which were previously only available on the alternative Application Menu ('Kicker'), are now features of the default Application Launcher, which both share the same A backend.
New widgets for Plasma
Color Picker
Not only have we restored the Color Picker, but we've given it a new UI in Plasma 5.
Color Picker allows you to extract colors from anywhere on the screen and automatically copies the color code to the clipboard. It supports multiple formats (RGB, Hex, Qt QML rgba, LaTeX).
User Switcher
The User Switch feature has also been updated and improved, and is now accessible from the Application Launcher, User Switcher component, and the lock screen. It displays the user's full name and the avatar the user has set. This is useful when using shared desktop computers in an office, see the developer's blog for more information .
disk quota
Plasma 5.5 has a new component designed for business environments or universities. This component shows you not the actual disk usage, but the limit your system administrator allows you to use.
Activity Pager
This is an example of partial overlap between activities and virtual desktops: it looks like a pager and behaves like it, but it uses activities instead of virtual desktops. This allows you to quickly see what activities are running and how many windows are associated with them.
Restored support for the old system tray icon
Based on feedback, we have rewritten to support legacy applications that do not use StatusNotifier and place their icons in the system tray area.
Bug status
As of Plasma 5.5 beta, we have fixed an incredible 1,000 bugs .
KWin supports OpenGL ES
In KWin, support for switching to OpenGL ES is back. So far, only switching and restarting KWin via environment variables is supported. Setting environment KWIN_COMPOSEto ' O2ES' forces a switch to the OpenGL ES backend. Please note that OpenGL ES is not supported by all drivers. Since it's not exposed via configuration, switch to "Expert" mode to try it out.
Wayland support in progress
Basic Wayland session functionality is provided in Plasma 5.5. Wayland is the successor to the outdated X11 windowing system and provides a modern approach. The system is more secure (keyloggers, for example, are less easy to get in). Following the principle of "every frame perfect" makes our display even more perfect. The KDE community has provided a technology preview on Plasma 5.4 based on the Phone Project's feature set. In Plasma 5.5 it has now been extended to be more suitable for "desktop style" use. The desktop interface supports important features like window moving/resizing as well as many built-in features. It's ready for preliminary use, although we need to point out that it's not a complete replacement for X sessions. We encourage more technical users to try it out and report any bugs you find to us.
To configure the screens to which Wayland sessions are connected, we created a new screen management protocol .
Some protocols have also been added in Wayland to control KWin effects, such as window background blur and window minimization animation.
Plasma on Wayland sessions now has a featured security lock screen, which does something not quite possible in X sessions. You can learn more about this 11-year-old bug on the screenlocker integration developer's blog .
Also check out the Known Issues for Wayland on the errata page .
Discover’s new design
With help from the KDE Visual Design Group, our software installer has a new look and improved usability.
new default font
Our default font has been switched to Noto , a beautiful free font that keeps a harmonious feel across languages.
information Center
A status module has been added to the file indexer.
Plasma Network Manager
There are several improvements to our Network Manager application . With the addition of WPA/WPA2 Enterprise verification and the use of a new password field component, OpenVPN has more options.
wallpaper
In Plasma 5.5 we have a new selection of beautiful wallpapers from RJ Quiralta, Martin Klapetek, Timothée Giet, Dmitri Popov, Maciej Wiklo and Risto S.
Full changelog
See the full Plasma 5.5.0 changelog .
Known issues
Please refer to the Plasma 5.5 errata page for some issues with maximum configurations, including some caused by Intel drivers.
Live mirror
The easiest way to experience Plasma 5.5 is to boot the Live image from USB. You can find a list of Plasma 5 Live mirrors on the KDE Community Wiki .
Software package download
Releases have been created, or are in the process of being created, and packages are listed on our wiki page.
Source code download
You can install Plasma 5 directly from the source code. KDE's community wiki has compilation instructions . Note that Plasma 5 cannot coexist with Plasma 4. You will need to uninstall the older version or install it to a different location.
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