14 DAY TRIAL // Plasma, the desktop for the KDE project, has been updated once again and the KDE Community has detailed all the wonderful improvements and numerous fixes that have been implemented.
The KDE project has been split in three major components and they are now known as KDE Plasma (the desktop), KDE Applications (all the apps associated with the KDE experience), and KDE Frameworks (all under-the-hood libraries and components).
This was done for several reasons, but the most important one was to decouple all projects from one another so that developers won't have to wait around until everyone is done in order to get a new release out the door. This also creates some minor problems with the versions, which differ from one component to another, but it's nothing out of the ordinary.
The KDE Plasma desktop is advancing rapidly
Since the new Plasma desktop was released, from 5.x on up, no distro has been integrated officially, although it's considered stable. For now, Kubuntu has announced that the version that will be made available in April, 15.04, will feature Plasma 5 by default. Today's release is a Beta one, but it's an important one and it needs to be properly tested.
"This release adds a number of new components and improves the existing desktop. We welcome all testers to find and help fix the bugs before our stable release in two weeks' time," is noted in the official announcement from Jonathan Riddell.
Some of the new modules include BlueDevil (management for Bluetooth devices), a new login manager called SDDM, a System Settings module to set up multiple monitor support, and a new module that allows users to theme apps that come from the Google stack.
Martin Gräßlin also explained that the new release comes with "a completely rewritten window decoration engine giving us better looks, better memory usage, less cpu usage, faster restart time (that's a feature hopefully only I and other KWin hackers need) and improved stability (especially Aurorae)."
You can also download the latest KDE Plasma 5.2 Beta source packages from Softpedia or you can try Kubuntu 14.10 with Plasma 5 as a Live CD, if you want to see the new desktop in action.
