Plasma 2 With KDE Frameworks 5 Looks Awesome

Sebastian Kügler of KDE has talked about progress made on Plasma 2, the port of the Plasma Workspaces desktop to using KDE Frameworks 5 that in turn works atop Qt 5. The possibilities opened up for Plasma 2 due to KDE Frameworks 5 and using an OpenGL scene-graph are impressive and awesome.

KDE Frameworks 5 is coming and with it will come Plasma 2. The Plasma 2 interface is designed around an OpenGL scene-graph with all composition occuring on the GPU. Work recently done by Sebastian and others have been working on QML imports and other components for bringing the new Plasma desktop up to speed on this highly-modularized next-generation KDE stack.

Shared yesterday on Google+ was some experimental work done by Kügler. "Taking a break from this more boring work, I thought I'd look into what we can do with all this now, so I browsed through Qt's examples and borrowed some of its shader code to create a few effect that show a little what we are now able to do with all the new scenegraph goodness. The video shows a demo Plasma widget that uses a PageStack to organize and navigate different pages in the UI, which show individual effects. There's Wobble, Rainbow Particles, a simple red square and an interactive editor that lets you enter simple shader programs, and upload them to the graphics card. The wallpaper used is using a bit of javascript to have leaves drop over the screen. This is also implemented in QML, and can be loaded separately as wallpaper plugin."

Here's the demo code in action to show the new possibilities opened up by KDE Plasma 2 with Frameworks 5: