KDE Releases Plasma 5.1

jrepin notes the release of KDE Plasma 5.1. Quoting the release announcement: KDE Plasma 5.1 sports a wide variety of improvements, leading to greater stability, better performance and new and improved features. Thanks to the feedback of the community, KDE developers were able to package a large number of fixes and enhancements into this release, among which more complete and higher quality artwork following the new-in-5.0 Breeze style, re-addition of popular features such as the Icon Tasks taskswitcher and improved stability and performance.

Those traveling regularly will enjoy better support for time zones in the panel's clock, while those staying at home a revamped clipboard manager, allowing you to easily get at your past clipboard's content. The Breeze widget style is now also available for Qt4-based applications, leading to greater consistency across applications. The work to support Wayland as display server for Plasma is still ongoing, with improved, but not complete support in 5.1. Changes throughout many default components improve accessibility for visually impaired users by adding support for screenreaders and improved keyboard navigation. Aside from the visual improvements and the work on features, the focus of this release lies also on stability and performance improvements, with over 180 bugs resolved since 5.0 in the shell alone."

Comments

Convergence...?

[taiwanjohn]

Are the KDE/Gnome wars winding down yet? It seems like both have made a lot of progress in recent years, to the point where both are pretty solid and flexible. Is there really a "difference" anymore for the average user?

Re:Convergence...?

[fnj]

GNOME won, that was pretty much it.

And then committed hara-kiri. Sayonara, Gnome.

Performance improvements

[gTsiros]

someone explain to me why each newer version is progressively slower on the same hardware as time goes by? If we were to believe the continuous performance improvements, this thing would hit 120 fps on a 286 by now.

Re:Performance improvements

[Nimey]

I know! It's terrible that I can't run the newest software on my 90 MHz Pentium with 32MB of RAM. I mean, Firefox 2.0 takes /35 seconds/ to start on the poor old thing, that's just unacceptable.

Re:Does anyone still use Gnome?

[DavidCBillen]

I want to like KDE. I want to love it. It's good looking. But, for some reason, even though it's like falling off a log to write bug free code with Qt, KDE programs and tools seems riddled with issues. I've had to pitch more KDE apps than I care to think about, (i.e. Amarok, KDevelop). So I end up running gnome applications anyway - I may as well have things consistent. Anyway, I don't need or want much from a desktop other than to get out of my way and give me easy access to things. I just boot OpenBox with tint2 for a status bar and a customized popup menu. I've never been happier, not even on OSX.

Re:Bring back KDE3

[TheCycoONE]

Trinity Desktop Environment isn't dead: when I wrote this the last git update was 5 minutes ago (https://git.trinitydesktop.org/cgit/). It's just very very niche, so don't expect much help from your distro.

It's probably easiest to try out on Arch Linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/ind...

Re:Does anyone still use Gnome?

[Mr_Wisenheimer]

Yes, KDE does certainly have some issues. No matter what I have tried, KATE simply does not seem to work well over SSH (and I've tried every Xwindows system under the sun: OSX, three different Windows X emulators, Ubuntu, et cetera).

That is an annoying bug that has been part of KDE as long as I can remember, which is too bad, because I love KATE.

Re:Does anyone still use Gnome?

[CajunArson]

Have you tried running Kate locally and accessing files remotely via the sftp:// KIO helper?

Re:Does anyone still use Gnome?

[BringsApples]

Yep, the corporate backing is a huge win for GNOME.

WTF!?? Since when is corporate anything good just because it's corporate? Money is good, but who cares where it comes from? Anyway it seems that once a corporation has a part to play in things, it wants some sort of return. That's how they squeeze in the red tape, all over everything, and eventually make the project suck.

Re:Does anyone still use Gnome?

[devent]

You can deactivate all animations with 4 clicks. System Settings -> Desktop Effects -> Animation Speed Instant -> Apply
Huge icons? If the icons are too big click on the tool-bar and set Icon Size [x] Small.
"understand how to use it" What? KDE 4 is like the desktop in KDE 1.
""Activity"? Is it a workspace?" Who cares, don't use it, don't worry about it.