KDE Plasma 5 Officially Released

[Luke_Wolf]

Both Dolphin and Konsole are already ported in git, BTW - many of us have been dogfooding those ports daily for weeks. They're just not quite release-ready yet, and we're staggering releases rather than trying to do it all at once (remember how that went with KDE 4 ). Keep in mind this release and news post is about Plasma 5, and those applications aren't part of Plasma.

And that you can keep using KDE 4 apps in Plasma 5 is a good thing, not a bad thing .

Does the KWallet integration with KDE 4 apps work with Plasma 5 (seems broken here) or will it only work with KF5 apps?

[Sho_]

Does the KWallet integration with KDE 4 apps work with Plasma 5 (seems broken here) or will it only work with KF5 apps?

TBH I actually don't know, I have to defer to folks who worked on KWallet bits there - try catching apachelogger on Freenode e.g.

(I work on core Plasma Desktop bits and a bunch of apps.)

[Aleve Sicofante]

What I don't get is why is this an official release? I understand the Visual Design team had not enough time to get things done. Then why not wait for them to finish? Why do the KDE developers think it's OK to ship such a visual mess AGAIN? Will the KDE teams ever learn that visual design is fundamental to usability?

[asdfblah]

What is wrong with all the whiners? I bet you haven't used KDE. If you do, but aren't capable of changing the theme/icons/etc... why are you using KDE in the 1st place?

What I don't get is why is this an official release? I understand the Visual Design team had not enough time to get things done. Then why not wait for them to finish? Why do the KDE developers think it's OK to ship such a visual mess AGAIN? Will the KDE teams ever learn that visual design is fundamental to usability?

If we judge from history (KDE 4.0), official release != completely usable. Let just hope history doesn't repeat again, with people blaming KDE devs for the mistakes of distro maintainers (distributing non-complete software). (OTOH, KDE could have been numbered "4.99", to show it's still being developed).

[Anarchy]

Congratulations to the KDE guys.

[Delgarde]

You know what would be awesome? Instead of total icon redesigns, every project lead (or whatever KDE calls them) could do their app icons however they want, then have a themeing program that modifies all the icons based on the theme specs, whether it's monochrome, oxygenlike, pastel, etc. That way, only a single change system would have to be changed with the themes, instead of every single icon everywhere on the desktop. I know it's probably harder to make than it sounds, but it would theoretically solve all of the icon theme issues.

Sure, just wave a magic wand, and everything will be exactly as you want. What, you don't have one of those?

[stevenc]

http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0/screenshots/desktop.png

It looks really pretty, but I have to ponder some of the fine details: why I should feel a mental connection between a picture of a Greek-looking building and my 'Applications'; and the irony of there being one menu category called 'Computer', on my computer. Doesn't look too keyboard-friendly at first glance - I hope there are still ALT-key accelerators for most menus and I can navigate with cursor keys - for those of us who operate a computer with more than one hand (I'm looking disgustedly at you, tablet or Mac users).

Oh, and small medium-gray text in the light-gray menu might have 'seemed like a good idea at the time', but just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

[Sho_]

^ About the temple icon, we've actually had the same discussion. I'd expect it to be replaced later. It's one of those bottleneck/fell-through-the-cracks/dropped-the-ball deals - launcher icon theming came online fairly late, there wasn't a lot of time for the icon artists to begin with, and until close to release that icon actually used to be a stylized "A". Which of course isn't acceptable for localization (text in icons is generally a no-no for that reason), so it was replaced last-minute with the temple. I don't think anyone is particularly happy with it.

Keyboard navigation in Kickoff is actually fairly decent, also in the alternative cascading menu launcher. The KDE accessibility team is currently doing a pass at keyboard- and screenreader-proofing things, though. There's already a bunch of improvements for the latter queued for the first maintenance release.

[Awesomeness]

http://www.kde.org/announcements/pla...ts/desktop.png
It looks really pretty, but I have to ponder some of the fine details: why I should feel a mental connection between a picture of a Greek-looking building and my 'Applications'

Duh, that's because all these applications have been written using Borland Delphi.

[Blahblah]

Looks very nice; I've always liked KDE.