KDE Plasma 5

KDE Plasma 5
Original author(s) KDE
Developer(s) KDE
Initial release July 15, 2014[1]
Stable release 5.2.2 / March 24, 2015[2]
Written in C++, QML
Operating system Linux, FreeBSD, et al.
Type
  • Graphical shell
  • Widget engine
  • Linux on the desktop
License GNU Lesser General Public License
Website www.kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0/

KDE Plasma 5 refers to the latest iteration of the desktop environment created by KDE primarily for Linux systems. KDE Plasma 5 is the successor of KDE Plasma 4 and was initially released on July 15, 2014.[1] It includes a new default theme, known as "Breeze", as well as increased convergence[3][4] across different devices.

Overview

First Technology Preview of Plasma 5

Software architecture

KDE Plasma 5 is built using Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5.[5] Plasma 5.0 improves support for HiDPI displays and ships a converged graphical shell, able to switch between the shells for different target devices. It includes a new default theme, known as Breeze. Changes under the hood include the migration to a new, fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack centered around an OpenGL(ES)-based scene graph (canvas).

Windowing systems

KDE Plasma 5 can utilize backends to multiple windowing systems, namely to the X11 and Wayland protocols for Linux/BSDs, to Quartz for OS X and GDI for Windows.

Plasma 5 completes the migration of KDE Plasma 4 to QtQuick. Qt 5's QtQuick 2 uses a hardware-accelerated OpenGL(ES) scenegraph to compose and render graphics on the screen, which allowed for offloading of computationally expensive graphics rendering tasks onto the GPU which frees up resources on the system's main central processing unit, and is faster and more power-efficient. Internal changes in the graphics compositor and underlying Frameworks prepare support for running on Wayland, which is planned for an upcoming release.

Development

Since the split of the KDE Software Compilation into KDE Frameworks 5, KDE Plasma 5 and KDE Applications 5, each subproject can pick its own development pace.[6] KDE Plasma 5 is on its own release schedule with feature releases every three months and bugfix releases in the intervening months.

Press coverage

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "KDE Plasma 5.0 Released". KDE. 2014-07-15. Retrieved 2014-08-19.
  2. ↑ "KDE Ships Plasma 5.2.2, Bugfix Release for February". KDE. 2015-03-24. Retrieved 2015-04-01.
  3. ↑ "KDE Plasma 5 Arrives with Fresh New Look, True Convergence". OMG! Ubuntu!. 2014-07-15. Retrieved 2015-02-11.
  4. ↑ "New Plasma brings a cleaner interface on top of a new graphics stack". KDE. 2014-07-15. Retrieved 2015-02-11.
  5. ↑ Jos Poortvliet (2013-12-17). "Qt 5.2 - Foundation for KDE Frameworks 5". Dot.kde.org. Retrieved 2014-03-10.
  6. ↑ "Release schedule for KDE Plasma 5".

External links