You can now test the next-gen KDE Plasma desktop environment

Jul 10, 2014 12:05 GMT  ·  By

KDE was proud to announce on July 8 that that RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming Plasma 5 graphical desktop environment, which is now known as KDE Applications and Platform, is available for download and testing.

Plasma 5 Release Candidate comes one day after the announcement of the final release of KDE Frameworks 5, a collection of next-gen KDE libraries that have been optimized and modularized for easy integration in Qt apps.

This is the last development release of the next-gen KDE desktop environment and introduces bug fixes and improvements, as well as a wide range of new functionalities and applications that were not available in the Beta releases of Plasma 5.

“July 8, 2014. KDE has today made available the candidate for the first release of Plasma 5, the next generation desktop. This is one last chance to test for bugs and check for problems before the final release next week,” was stated in the official release announcement.

The Plasma 5 Release Candidate graphical environment is comprised of several applications, desktop utilities, and other essential packages, which means that it is pretty hard for a normal user to test it on a distribution of Linux.

Therefore, our suggestion is to download a temporary ISO image from the official release announcement (see link above) and test Plasma 5 on your computer. Please note that the ISO image is a Live CD that won’t install anything on your computer.