Ya we are in the new era of KDE SC. Plasma 5.2 has been released with new functionalities and many bug fixes, which we will talk about below.
New Plasma 5.2 Components
This version of Plasma comes with some new components to make KDE an even more complete desktop:
- Bluedevil: it will allow us to manage Bluetooth devices. We can configure our mouse, keyboard, and send / receive files, in addition to navigating the devices compatible with this technology.
- KSSHAskPass: If we access other computers by ssh, and as it should be logical, the user has a password, this module will give us a graphical user interface to enter the password.
- Muon: With this tool (already known to many) we will be able to install, manage software and other add-ons for your computer.
- Configuration for SDDM: SDDM is now the access manager of choice for Plasma, replacing the old KDM, and this new System Configuration module allows you to configure the theme.
- KScreen: it is the system configuration module to configure the support for multiple monitors (see later image).
- Style for GTK applications: this new module allows you to configure the themes of Gnome applications.
- KDecoration- This new library makes it easier to make themes for KWin more reliably. It has impressive memory, performance and stability improvements. If you are missing a feature, don't worry, it will be back in Plasma 5.3.
In addition, now we can undo the action of removing a Widget in Plasma:
Locker now it is more powerful and more organized when it comes to displaying the information we need, and it even allows us to control the music player. Also, it is now launched using the key combination Alt + Virtual.
Kwin It already comes with the new theme that we have already seen by default and we have a new set of cursors and icons called Breeze (Brisa), although in my opinion it still lacks (the icons) a lot of applications to support.
For the rest we have new Widgets for the desktop, The alternative application menu (Kicker) you can install applications from the menu itself and add editing functions. Baloo you get optimizations and now consume much less CPU at startup. The query analyzer has new functionalities to for example write "type: Audio" in Krunner and filter the audio results.
In the screen locker, the integration with logind has been improved to ensure that the screen is properly closed before suspending. The screen background can be set. Internally it uses part of the Wayland protocol, which is the future of the Linux desktop.
There are improvements in handling multiple monitors. Detection code for multiple monitors managed to be ported to use the XRandR extension directly and several related bugs were fixed. These and other improvements can be seen in the Release Notes.
The transition is on its way
At least in ArchLinux we already have some packages that perfectly complement the old KDE 4.14, Kate, Console, are two examples of it. Although for KDE4 the user settings will be kept in ~ / .kde4 /, for new applications they will be saved in ~ / .config / as the Arch Wiki.
At the moment I'm not sure if Plasma 5.2 can be fully installed on ArchLinux, although I suppose it can. Later we will bring you information about it and how to do it if possible.
Plasma 5.2 manual installation
I just did a manual installation from Antergos (without graphical environment) and basically this is what needs to be installed so that everything works more or less decently:
$ sudo pacman -S xorg plasma-meta konsole plasma-nm kdebase-dolphin sni-qt kdemultimedia-kmix networkmanager oxygen-gtk2 oxygen-gtk3 oxygen-kde4 oxygen breeze-kde4 kdegraphics-ksnapshot kate
KMix still doesn't work though. This is what it looks like:
I have been trying to use the previous versions in Archlinux, but I have had many problems or incompatibilities, I hope soon it will be possible to use KDE Plasma in production.
I just installed it using Antergos as a base and unfortunately it still depends on many things from KDE 4.14, such as Dolphin. It still lacks ..
I will wait for this more mature Kde 5 for now Kaos is doing well with kde 4.14.4
Well, Anke calculates going to kf5 by the end of February, going to keep only kf5 and plasma 5, it will stop keeping kde 4.
Good information by the way ...
For things like this I miss ArchLinux. But in the meantime I enjoy KDE on Fedora.
And you do well to do it.
And you do well to do it. Also, you can install Plasma 5 on Fedora.
Well, I was not so aware of what was happening to my arch applications. I use the global menu and already kwrite, kate and konsole had lost it. Then I realized why. Now, there is something that caught my attention and it was the announcement of Andrea Scarpino https://www.archlinux.org/news/transition-of-kde-software-to-the-kde-framework-and-qt-5/ in which it recommends changing to the Plasma 5.2 version.
Is it really a good idea to switch to Plasma 5.2? If so, what is the correct way to do it? or will it be better to do a clean installation?
In advance, thank you very much.
I have a couple of doubts ... let's see if you know something ...
Will KWin standalone be installed?
What's going to happen to Dolphin and will there be a substitute?
Can Plasma be installed without Badoo?
Thank you.
Well, I don't know well yet. See my comment above .. 🙁
Sounds great! Thanks for the info… Slds!
KDE is getting very very nice by default now
Excellent looks, every day KDE improves. and the functionalities not to mention, very good, hopefully the ideas of microsoft and apple do not steal their ideas from kde.
The most beautiful KDE default layout I have ever seen.
I do not know at the level of functionality ... but it has caught my attention that it looks so good by default, from mandriva I did not see something so careful
I will keep waiting for the stable version of kde 5
kde4 is the most stable desktop that I have used I would not change it for now
For those of you using Plasma 5, how about the ram consumption compared to KDE 4.14?
They comment that consumption has dropped considerably. I was testing it for a week (the previous one, 5.1), and I noticed that it responded very well, it gave the impression that it was more fluid than KDE4. Of course, I had several kwin and plasma chrashes, and well, since I have the computer to work with, for once I did the right thing and went back to KDE4. I will retest 5.2 to see how it works. But I find that it still lacks a bit to be as stable as KDE4.
It must be recognized that compared to KDE 4.14, plasma 5 consumes more RAM.
It consumes me about 10% of 4GB, so it consumes a lot of RAM. But despite that, my Arch is doing very well.
PS: Elav with the command I think you have left the package «plasma», which includes other also important packages. At least yesterday when I installed it, what I did was:
sudo pacman -S plasma plasma-meta konsole kdebase-dolphin kate sni-qt breeze-kde4 k3b kdeutils-ark
… Is that this so mature kde 4.14…. I would use it until 2018 at least. Damn rolling!
I did a clean install of 15.04, and I had image issues with the NVIDIA GS7300 card, it finished installing, and it got black screen. I had to reinstall the 14.10.
The new features that matter most to many users are not here, but don't worry, I put them on.
- 150 MB of RAM LESS consumption (people who consume more is because they are loading KDE4 libraries, check)
- Speed increases with all accelerated applications. The effect is brutal in Chrome; He walks 20 to 30% faster, subjectively.
I've been testing it several times and I still can't get many icons on the tray even doing what they say in the forums. It happens to you, I have installed it previously and it does not even save the configuration.
Does it happen to someone?
Which ones do not come out?
Some examples, mega, bcloud, cloud mail ru for example.
And the configuration is not saved, if I exit and enter it is as if I just installed it again. It is a new and clean facility.
If I use antergos in a virtual machine I get all the icons in the tray, install whatever I install, whatever.
Something similar happened to me yesterday. What I did was delete all the configuration files from my / home. I rebooted and voila, the settings were working. I have not tried the ones you comment on, but at least the MEGA one if I get it. I leave you a capture. https://plus.google.com/118419653942662184045/posts/cfPeo35HQ4j
As I solve the problem with the NVIDIA GS7300 card, it does not respond to Plasma 5, with clean installation of 15.04, it remains black screen.
I have installed kubuntu 15.04 with Plasma 5.3 and in a week that I have been using it it has hit me a couple of times. I have noticed certain problems when working with several open apks, libreofice + amarok + Firefox ends up giving a shaking and slowdown in the window changes.
The software updater has been closed to me only twice.
And it has thrown me stupid bugs the kind that were released before the beta versions of Ubuntu.
On the other hand, I smell some incompatibility with Firefox, because it has given me several problems.
Sometimes I feel that at any moment the system breaks down hahaha.
Can I install Plasma 5 on Lubuntu?