KDE Plasma 5 + KDE Applications Matured Rather Well

Most KDE users are probably happy with the current state of the Plasma desktop and the state of the KDE applications. There's certainly less bugs in recent releases, KWin and the overall desktop is in better standing (though still improvements to be made such as showcased by the likes of KWin low-latency) with reliable Wayland support, and most would probably agree that the work out of this open-source project matured rather well in recent years with their focus on enhancing usability and other areas.

With 2020 quickly approaching, for reliving the KDE highlights of the 2010s, here is a look back at the most popular KDE articles during the past ten years on Phoronix.

Linus Torvalds Switches Back To KDE
Linus Torvalds has announced today via his Google+ page that he's switched back to using the KDE desktop. He's provided his positive and negative feedback after having previously dumped KDE/GNOME in favour of Xfce.

KDE's Kdenlive Video Editor Has Gone Dark
While there's many Kdenlive fans out there for the KDE-focused open-source video editor, it seems new development efforts around the project have ceased.

Kubuntu 15.10 Could Be The End Of The Road
While tensions appeared eased yesterday between the Ubuntu and Kubuntu camps with Jonathan Riddell stepping down from his leadership roles, that may not be the end of the story.

KDE's Nepomuk Doesn't Seem To Have A Future
It appears there isn't much of a future left to KDE's Nepomuk framework. It's going to be replaced going forward in the KDE land.

2016 Wayland Experiences: GNOME: Perfect, KDE: Bad, Enlightenment: Good
Developer Pavlo Rudyi has written a blog post about his experiences with the different desktop environments currently supporting Wayland. The results aren't a big surprise, but nevertheless it's great to see the continued interest in Wayland and the ongoing work by many different parties in ensuring Wayland will be able to dominate the Linux desktop.

KDE No Longer Competitive? Developer Calls It Quits
Peter Penz, the main developer of the Dolphin file manager for the KDE desktop and a K Desktop user since KDE v1.2, is calling it quits after contributing to KDE for more than the past half-decade. His reason for leaving the development of the popular open-source desktop environment is interesting.

GNOME & KDE Developers Go To Battle Over A Name
Ahead of the Berlin Desktop Summit, several GNOME and KDE developers have begun a mailing list battle...over a name. In particular, that with GNOME 3.0 their control panel areas is called "System Settings", which is precisely what the KDE developers call their system control area too.

Fedora KDE Takes A Blow; Fedora 23 KDE Spin Is "Easily The Worst" They've Spun
The Fedora KDE community has been dealt a blow today with one of the co-maintainers of the Fedora KDE packages resigning from those duties along with his roles relating to the Fedora KDE special interest group.

KDE Plasma Mobile Is Beginning To Look Surprisingly Good
The KDE Plasma Mobile team has begun publishing weekly reports on their development efforts for making KDE software more suitable for mobile devices as well as convergence and other efforts in common with KDE on the desktop.

Shashlik: A New Way To Run Android Apps On Linux
Shashlik is an "Android Simulated Environment" to serve as a launcher for running Android applications on a conventional GNU/Linux distribution.

KDE On Wayland To Be Focus For Next Few Months
KDE on Wayland should get much love in 2014.

KDE Developers Discuss Merging Libraries With Qt
Well, here's some interesting weekend news: there's a polarized discussion taking place right now among core KDE developers about merging the KDE libraries into upstream Qt. Cornelius Schumacher, a long-time German KDE developer and currently the KDE e.V. president, has come out yesterday saying, "Let's merge Qt and the KDE development platform. Let's put all KDE libraries, support libraries, platform modules into Qt, remove the redundancies in Qt, and polish it into one nice consistent set of APIs, providing both, the wonderful KDE integration, consistency and convenience, as well as the simplicity and portability of the Qt platform."

SDDM Is The Recommended Display Manager Of KDE Plasma 5
For those wondering about display/log-in managers for KDE's Plasma 5, KDM was dropped.

Babe: KDE Gets Another Music Player
Not to be confused with the KDE Elisa music player written about just two weeks ago as a new alternative to Juk, Amarok, Cantata, and other KDE music/media player projects, the latest effort is called Babe.

GNOME Shell vs. KDE Plasma Graphics Tests On Wayland vs. X.Org Server
A premium member this week had requested some benchmarks of openSUSE Tumbleweed when looking at the performance of KDE Plasma vs. GNOME Shell in some open-source graphics/gaming tests while also looking at the Wayland vs. X.Org Server performance.

LibreOffice Gets "KDE 5" Integration That's A GTK3/KDE5 Hybrid
It's unfortunately too late for the upcoming LibreOffice 6.0 open-source office suite that was branched two weeks ago, but its next release will feature a KDE5 desktop back-end.

Kubuntu 12.04 To Drop KDE Support For Firefox
Besides Canonical no longer sponsoring the Kubuntu distribution following the 12.04 LTS release of this KDE-focused Ubuntu derivative, there's some more changes this cycle. As a last minute change prior to next month's Kubuntu 12.04 release, Mozilla Firefox support is being dropped.

QupZilla Web Browser Becomes KDE Falkon
The QupZilla open-source web-browser built using Qt WebEngine and in development for the past seven years is now part of the KDE project and has renamed itself to Falkon.

A New KDE Music Player: Elisa
While Amarok has not seen a release in years and Juk development not being too vibrant, now there's another new KDE music player option: Elisa.

Qt/GTK Speed On Unity/KDE/Xfce/LXDE/GNOME/Razor
Shared earlier today were OpenGL game benchmarks under different Linux desktops. Now to complement those earlier results are 2D performance tests under Unity, KDE, GNOME Shell, Xfce, LXDE, and Razor-qt.

The State Of Flatpak vs. Snaps On Various Linux Distributions
Motivated by KDE Plasma Leaning Towards Focusing On Flatpak Over AppImage/Snaps and this lengthy, contentious forum thread, a KDE contributor has taken a closer look at the Flatpak versus Snaps versions available in different Linux distributions.

KDE Plasma 5.12 Pushing For "An Awesome Release On Wayland"
While today's release of KDE Plasma 5.11 brings with it many Wayland improvements, KWin maintainer Martin Flöser (né Gräßlin) is proposing to get the Plasma 5.12 support into better shape on Wayland.

KDE Plasma Getting Chrome Integration, Followed By Firefox
KDE Plasma is getting web-browser integration initially for Google Chrome and is expected to be followed by Mozilla Firefox support.

Should Ubuntu Have Gone With KDE Instead Of GNOME?
With last week's surprise decision by Mark Shuttleworth to abandon Unity 8 efforts and switch back to the GNOME desktop by Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, while some applauded the decision, others begged the question why not switch to KDE or "Ubuntu should default to [your favorite DE]."

Kubuntu's Release Manager Calls It Quits
After Jonathan Riddell lost his leadership roles relating to Ubuntu, the future of Kubuntu became quite vague for after Kubuntu 15.10. Riddell has announced now that he's leaving Kubuntu.