Submitted by 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.
Yesterday I was brave enough to update my home desktop to Kubuntu 15.04 with KDE 5.2 (that’s what holidays are for!). There are simply too many parts that crash or stop responding in one way or another. I’m looking forward to the update just for those 393 bug fixes alone.
As an unrelated note, after the upgrade process I also had to delete all .Xauthority* files to be able to login into a desktop. It took me way too long to figure that out.
Kubuntu 15.04 has introduced the change to Plasma 5, but also to systemd, and to SDDM.
If a bug report is created in
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug/?no-redirect
they can start seeing if there is a problem in a program, or with a driver in a PC, for example.
Edited 2015-04-28 22:24 UTC
And also a behind-the-scenes work on the change to Wayland. As far as I know, those are the big changes where developers have been working.
About how to install Plasma 5.3 in Kubuntu 15.04:
http://www.kubuntu.org/news/plasma-5.3
Edited 2015-04-28 22:52 UTC
Thanks! I’ll know what to do this weekend.
It also helps to clear your ~/.cache folder too.
That’s one of the things that drives me nuts about these upgrades. Why the hell should you have to delete certain files and clear caches? If you have to do this manually, it’s a BUG. If it can be done automatically wtihout you knowing about it because some formats have changed, that’s fine. But anything that requires manual intervention like this is a serious problem.
I didn’t have the problems you had upgrading to Kubuntu 15.04. My Lord, it’s absolutely beautiful. I haven’t seen a desktop that’s looked that good in a while. Granted, I’ve been using Crunchbang for 3 years (RIP). Looking forward to the next Plasma update to fix any potential issues I may encounter though.
Dan
Yeah I enjoy it as well, with some tweaks of course. I think the breeze icons are a bit ugly and the default background is way too vivid. Back to the boring Windows 2k blue for me!
Part of my problems were probably caused by my NVIDIA card. It tends to cause some strange X behaviour when starting/stopping the X server if the built-in Intel card is enabled. This happened during the upgrade process as well. Disabling the Intel card in the BIOS solved it but those stale Xauthority files may very well be the result of that.
Plasma 5 is awesome, but I wish they did something about terrible amount of wasted space with Breeze. I normally use smaller fonts for desktop elements (like 8, condensed) and this hard-coded padding is so hideous.
More on topic: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=285&t=123561
I hope time will come when these bugs will be reduced.
And KDE will ofer a slim version free from all the extra features that will never be used.
I certainly do not hope that they reduce the functionality, making it slim. This one of the reasons I love KDE. It is packed with configuration settings and I like how I can tune so many things. Make certain window rules, window matching, program rules … to name a few.
for everything I read, I will wait a little more time before make the move from my trustful KDE4.
Everyone else that also loves KDE go test it to help iron out whatever bug may be lurking on the shadows.
I’m just firing up the Fedora 22 KDE spin in a virtual machine. It’s migrated to KDE Plasma 5, and having reconfigured dnf to keep its cached packages, I’m busy building a local repository to install to all of my machines from when I feel comfortable that it’s mature.