The day of the release of Plasma 5 as a stable product is approaching (although we will see that later), and the KDE team meets its calendar minute by minute. That is why today the Plasma 5.4 Beta has been announced, which includes interesting news, especially in the visual section.
What's New in Plasma 5.4 Beta
To begin with, something that has taken me by surprise, and that in a way I appreciate and will appreciate, those who feel comfortable with GNOME Shell. Plasma 5 now includes a Dashboard as an alternative app launcher. Does it look like something you already know? It is possible, because it is a mixture of Dashboard GNOME and Unity.
Another novelty is a new Applet Sound, which now uses the bars horizontally, which works directly with PressAudio:
Plasma 5.4 brings more than 1.400 new icons that cover not only all KDE applications, but also provide icons for applications such as Inkscape, Firefox, and Libreoffice, which now appear to have a cool more native.
KRunner now remembers previous searches and automatically completes the history as we type. Didn't we have that anymore?
The network applet is now capable of displaying graphs of network traffic (back to the same, that was already in KDE4). It also supports two new VPN plugins to connect via SSH or SSTP.
Finally, these are other new features:
- Improvements in the support of high resolutions.
- Less memory consumption.
- The desktop finder gets a backend Too much faster.
- Sticky Notes add drag and drop support, plus keyboard navigation.
- Dragging and dropping to the trash now works.
- The system tray can be configured faster.
- The documentation was updated and revised.
- Digital clock improvements in narrow panels.
- New way to easily switch between 12h / 24h on the digital clock.
- Numbers of the weeks on the calendar.
- Any type of item can be marked as a favorite in the application menu (Kicker) from any point of view, adding support for documents and Telepathy contacts.
- Telepathy show the contact photo and a presence status badge in real time.
- Improvements in folder views.
These and many more improvements can be found in the official announcement.
Hello elav, hey how can I test it I just installed plasma 5 in debian testing, from the syduction repos
Do you know when it will be in any Debian branch?
regards
Good morning.
I really liked KDE plasma but when I provided it the live cd (USB) was very slow, I have an i3 and 4gb of RAM.
I had planned to install antecedents with cinnamon and because it will take up running virtual machines.
Could you tell me if the plasma performance has improved? He thought that when I provided it, it was in v1, and they could also tell me if I can run several virtual ones?
Performance is very good, much faster than Gnome or Cinnamon. Although, it consumes more resources, yes.
I have particularly had problems with Plasma 5 since its release, since the clock on the tray (only on the tray), marks one hour more than the corresponding one; I have seen that it does not happen to other people, although what I think is that this error is due to the fact that my country (Venezuela) has a single time slot.
Let's see if it happened to others ...
It also happens to me the same is the only detail that I have not been able to fix in plasma 5, But only with the Rejoj from the system tray, I have to remove it, I still have the Time and Calendar in the Conky, I use Archlinux I do not know if in another distro Pass the same, otherwise perfect details at the beginning with the composer that is easily solved.
Greetings also from Vzla.
I changed the time and, I think I remember, that I took off the watch and put it back on the bar and it was fixed, but it also gave me time to find the solution.
I have the same problem, the digital clock shows one hour more than the system time. It seems that the problem only occurs with the Venezuelan time.
I join the problem. I use openSUSE Leap. I have the same problem one hour more on the digital clock. Could anyone solve it?
I like it, I really like this KDE. Time to give it a new try. When is the release date of the stable? Could it be that I better wait a little longer or do I install it once in my Ubuntu? hehehe what do they say?
25 of this month.
Thank you !!, In that case, I better hope. There is nothing missing..
I upgraded from kubuntu 14.04 and I didn't expect it to work as well as it still does and has been with it for 3 months now. I like it a lot, maybe it consumes more RAM than other distributions but that's why I put 8GB and it feels very light when working with it.
Don't know when it will be available for Arch's Kde Unstable repository?
Yes, it's in [kde-unstable] 😀
http://mirrors.kernel.org/archlinux/kde-unstable/os/x86_64/
http://mirrors.kernel.org/archlinux/kde-unstable/os/i386/
Sorry, I correct the second link
http://mirrors.kernel.org/archlinux/kde-unstable/os/i686/
I edited the architecture by myself and got confused: v
Well, I went back to KDE 4, in its version 4.14.2. Plasma 5 has only given me problems. What if windows blinks, what if errors when turning off the pc. I will wait for it to be more stable, to test it again.
I gave KDE a chance with KAOS recently, it is true that I improve visually but in the end it always feels less practical than gnome.
Uhhh, well today I'm going to see if I install it in Arch and I rotten GNOME, and its forks. I don't think I'll make any more changes until Papyros takes out the first alpha, thanks for the info elav: D.
Does it say something about bug fixes? Why don't you see the 5.3 kid….
https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.3.2-5.3.95-changelog.php
Elav a little doubt, at the moment I have Kubuntu 14.04.02 LTS installed, with 3 swap partitions, root and home. Once I install a distro with Plasma 5 I would like to have the visual characteristics that it brings by default, would I have to delete .kde from my home or something like that? Would that be very traumatic or without problems would that guarantee me to have the look of the new plasma by default?
PS: I say all this because having the home separated in a partition that I do not touch to install, every time I install a new distro with a higher KDE look level I keep the preferences.
It looks interesting. Thanks for the information.
I tried Plasma 5 on an opensuse 12.3 a couple of months ago and had to go back to kde 4 as there was a problem that prevented the Dropbox icon from displaying in the systray. It seems there was a problem with Qt, I don't know if it was from Plasma or from the Dropbox client.
Do you know if it has already been solved?
To take a look at Plasma 5, install Manjaro 0.8.13.1 on a secondary hard drive and it actually looks pretty good.
However, sometimes I have problems with the desktop. Well, as @carlosigls comments, sometimes windows suddenly start blinking. Something that affects the user experience a bit.
Of course when using Plasma 5 we must bear in mind that it is still a desktop in development. So it is logical that we are faced with one or another bug that will be repaired in future versions.
If anyone is encouraged to try it. I recommend it! Well, very good.
However, I also recommend that you install it on another partition or on an extra hard drive. Well, at the moment it is not recommended to use it as a day-to-day desktop.
@Elav I don't know if you have had time to compare the performance of Plasma 5 and Gnome 3.18. But at least on my computer Plasma 5 runs much more fluid. While Gnome 3.18 is much more stable.
My experience with KDE 5 (plasma 5) was actually version 5.2 and 5.3 with these systems:
KaOS problems from boot, very bad I could not do it or start.
Manjaro small problem with the themes, icons and touchpad (which did not allow me to adjust the properties) quite annoying this experience honestly.
kubuntu was doing quite well for me but sometimes windows would close and it bothered me that not all KDE and QT software are up to date.
In openSuse problems with the window manager, flickering, errors when starting among other things that did not guarantee the configurations well (I always had to delete all the data and reinstall).
Fedora a better experience (that I had almost no problems) only a small annoyance with the touchpad, it did not allow me to configure correctly and problems in power configuration.
I recently tried Tanglu KDE (a modified debian but more updated in certain packages), it was nice with plasma 5.3, only a small problem with the cursor themes (some windows were Adwita, others Breeze), and an error when changing window themes .
In definitive:
general errors with the window manager (in one thing or another) and themes, it always bothers me a lot that I also can't press «super» (alone and only) to open the menu ... the rest is fine ...
I tried it with Kubuntu 15 and it was disastrous. Blinks, windows that showed half, except that I passed the mouse over the entire area and it showed me everything.
some configuration options disappear.
The Kate is horrible and not as configurable as the one in kde 14.
I do not recommend it for now.
Have you noticed if it is a problem with your driver or if you have not activated the hardware rendering of your video card? That happened to me with my integrated Intel graphics card for not installing the mesa-utils on Debian Jessie.
Thank you for your comment, it will be useful to many. I now remove it but the next time I try it I will see that of table-utils.
I will wait a year or more. I prefer the stable.
In my equipment I always take 1 or 2 days to get it ready and then I try not to touch anything.
I have the Jessi and it is a pipe. And in a laptop I can openuse because it was the only one that recognized everything. Kubuntu threw the wifi on me and then didn't pick it up until a reboot
I have installed KaOS 2015.8 which comes with Plasma 5.4 and KDE looks great.
Greetings and thanks for keeping us informed.
I openly declare myself a fan of KDE, but I hope this time it does not come with so many Bugs (the bugs appeared in Fedora 22 although I must say that the version for Ubuntu, that is, Kubuntu, is quite stable)
Good day. Some distro that allows you to move more than two monitors easily. I have tried ubuntu, mint and suse with no success. I've already tried win and kackintosh and everything goes smoothly. I have an asus board and several pairs of Nvidia gt, gts and quadros graphics. I also have several pairs of msi. Furthermore, a Dell t3400 q also supports dual graphics. I would greatly appreciate any guidance.
I have a laptop with Tumbleweed and Plasma 5: it hardly stresses the cpu and the memory consumption is marginal: 270 to 280 MB when you access the desktop. Another thing is when you open a browser that there if the consumption of RAM is triggered above 600Mb, and beyond if videos are played. It goes luxury tetes.