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KDE Plasma 5.3 Released

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

jrepin writes: The KDE community has released Plasma 5.3, a major new version of the popular, open source desktop environment. The latest release brings much enhanced power management, better support for Bluetooth, and improved Plasma widgets. Also available is a technical preview of Plasma Media Center shell. In addition, Plasma 5.3 represents a big step towards support for the Wayland windowing system. There are also a few other minor tweaks and over 300 bugfixes. Here is the full changelog, and here's the package download wiki page.

53 comments

  1. Popularity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I've been out of the Linux Desktop Environment market for a while now. Which is the most popular desktop environment in use today?

    1. Re:Popularity by kthreadd · · Score: 1

      Probably GNOME. It's the default desktop in most major distributions.

    2. Re:Popularity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mint has been gaining some groundswell and makes use of Cinnamon or MATE DE; forks of GNOME.

    3. Re:Popularity by kenaaker · · Score: 3, Informative
      I did find a survey (with, like, percentages and everything...) Here http://www.itworld.com/article....

      It seems to reflect Gnomes efforts to be very selective about their users.

    4. Re:Popularity by marcello_dl · · Score: 2

      Gnome is also the most unpopular, I gather.

      --
      ---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
    5. Re:Popularity by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 0

      KDE tends to be common "at work" if you have compute farms or whatever for design/engineering tools on RHEL/CentOS. Gnome tends to be more common "at home" for running your favorite distribution. Probably most people have Unity and never change it, but I still find it to be highly dysfunctional and intolerable.

      They all have their ups and downs, OS X still has the best & most responsive UI on top of a *nix. It's not entirely clear why Linux can't do that better, at the very least make a much less "heavy" UI that is responsive and smooth. Except that everyone involved seems to be more focused on reinventing the desktop environment to work on tablets which very few people really care about.

      Even with proprietary nVidia drivers and a very big video card, Gnome and Unity both seem to have the same handicap as Windows with regards to how the screen is drawn and updated such that you always get this "chugging" effect when you move stuff around. I have no idea why they obsess about icons and open/close buttons when the most important part isn't right.

    6. Re: Popularity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Xfce and KDE are popular among powerusers who need to get the most out of their systems. Those two desktop environments are the most technologically superior ones.

      GNOME 2 and its derivatives are still used by some powerusers, too. But most have migrated to Xfce or KDE, since GNOME 2 is getting outdated in many ways.

      GNOME 3 sees some use, but typically only by new and casual users who don't know that they're suffering an inferior experience.

    7. Re:Popularity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I hate Unity, Gnome is almost as bad. All I want is a basic desktop without all the pretty widgets. I always end up installing gnome-flashback to get the old desktop functionality.

    8. Re:Popularity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I miss KDE3.

    9. Re:Popularity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I cannot understand the term best GUI. I've switched 2 years ago to Xfce and with a third party file-manager(in my case nemo from Cinnamon IIRC ) it's by far the best DE that I can imagine(especially with the last update).
      On the other hand I think that you mean the integration of the OS X GUI and not the responsivness. Take in account that OS X has a very specific audience, people that like the point and click and then click again procedure and that's how far they can get.
      DEs that support linux and/or bsd are made by programmers and not by facebookers or chicks on instagram. There is a reason why some things are good and some are bad on those DEs.
      KDE and Gnome tried to steer their design the mainstream way and lost many of their users, including myself.
      To conclude OS X's gui, I believe, it's nothing special. In fact it's far from optimal for the screen and the user, but, similarly to windows, since there is no other one to compete with it, it is assumed to be the best... kinda what win7's or winXP's gui was back then.
      On a single platform, linux, you have numerous fully functional DEs, from KDE to Enlightment, so you'll always have the sense that nothing is completely perfect, because there will be always one that will have one extra feature.

    10. Re:Popularity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      use Mate Desktop
      it is a Gnome 2 fork in full development

    11. Re:Popularity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't you loose the new features in Gnome 3 by using Mate?

    12. Re:Popularity by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Distilling your comment into non-irate hate, my environment is 3 widescreen displays, side by side. Presently I have 13 terminals, 1 "heavy" text editor, two VNC sesions and chrome. I have similar environments on Gnome at home, and KDE at work (minus chrome).

      In terms of objectivity:
      - I have more usable screen space for me & my apps than I do in Gnome (no backdoor configuration, but a few mainstream mods), significantly more than KDE (running in those VNC sessions). I never bother with Unity anymore.
      - In terms of performance, I can drag windows around and do not wait for redraw once. When I drag a window the contents do not disappear, nor do they stop updating (why should they?), they simply move where my mouse puts them and continue playing video or scrolling text or whatever as they move. Gnome is second best. With 13 terminals open that does happen from time to time, but thanks to the magic of Spectacle I can usually avoid the mouse for simple operations. While I rarely sit at KDE directly, it was the worst performer when I last had it installed on my desktop. It works second best to OS X with VNC however. Gnome is terrible in that regard.
      - In terms of memory usage, in OS X it is hard to say for certain but "kernel task" is at 1.8GB, which certainly includes non OS things. No other task at this moment is above 600M. So let's call it 1.8GB. Gnome-shell is using 2.2GB, with only one chrome and one terminal open. The particularly old KDE implementation that comes on the company install of RHEL defeated my ability to gauge memory usage, it would appear to be around 500MB.
      - I'm not going to debate the facets of the X windowing system and where you feel the problem is, I don't care. I'm not an X developer and will not ever be. It's a package I install, I don't want to spend more than an hour or two configuring it. I understand that Gnome and KDE encompass a lot more than pixels, again that's not relevant for most users. To most of us it's pixels and if it doesn't work the way we want, we throw it out entirely.

      While I am an engineer and spend all day with various X's, write a lot of code, stare at a lot of waveforms, and run a lot of heavyweight processes, I don't understand why any sensible person would not want their window system to be smooth and responsive. First and foremost the machines that I use a windowing system are for me to interact with, I should be the priority. When it comes to heavy processing, I have machines that have absolutely no UI on that do the heavy lifting and parallel processing. If I *do* heavy processing on the machine with my window system, the UI needs to get priority, it is a desktop and interactive first and foremost. I'm not sure, beyond a few users with very specific needs, why anyone would not want that behavior out of the box. I've tried XFCE, and didn't like it. I haven't yet tried Mate/Cinnamon.

      I do want a good Linux solution it is my preferred OS and religion, but I find that once Canonical gave up the helm in favor of Unity, that Linux returned to it's native state of infighting and bullshit. It is still superior to Windows by lightyears, but there's no reason why the windowing systems continue to resemble angry squirrels wrestling in a canvas sack. I don't know what level of neck beardery suggests that you would prefer to have a sluggish, unresponsive windowing system, or why that helps you with coding or productivity related tasks, but it interferes with mine and my use case seems to resemble what you describe.

    13. Re:Popularity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not really. The notification manager works just fine. the hot-key lookup is there, and depending on distro, you might have to use gnome-tweak-tool to turn on or off other items, but one thing that Gnome3 has going for it is that it really does provide the same core for all the desktop configurations.

      That's not to steal from KDE's moment here, but considering everything, it is important to keep the fact from fiction regarding Gnome3.

    14. Re:Popularity by s.petry · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Popular != Best, which is extremely subjective. Lots of distros ship Gnome by default, Unity for Ubuntu. I know many people that load KDE and remove the others, it's a pretty desktop and highly configurable.

      One of the biggest reasons I prefer KDE in the business world is the ability to Kiosk since v2.x. Something Gnome has promised since version 2 but has never delivered on, and Unity never tried to my knowledge. I can enforce all kinds of policies through the Kiosk, making things like screen lock with password automagic. Auditors love it!

      --

      -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.

    15. Re:Popularity by Teun · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Was nice but KDE4 is much more complete and KDE5 still better.

      It's just not ready for prime-time.

      --
      "The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
    16. Re:Popularity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Something tells me that they didn't attempt any kind of selection bias, when Slackware outnumbers Fedora by like 5 to 1, and is on par with both Ubuntu and Mint. Also, they take various customizations of Gnome3 and break them out of "Gnome Shell", which makes it look like Gnome Shell has 1/3 of it's actual use.

    17. Re:Popularity by Teun · · Score: 1, Interesting
      Have a look at the latest Unity, it has come a looong way and just works.

      Personally I'm a Kubuntu man and indeed running this shiny KDE5.3 :)

      --
      "The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
    18. Re:Popularity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Trinity Desktop Environment is what you're looking for, then. It's the continuation KDE 3, just like MATE is the continuation of GNOME 2.

    19. Re:Popularity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Gnome and Unity both seem to have the same handicap as Windows with regards to how the screen is drawn and updated such that you always get this "chugging" effect when you move stuff around.

      Modern versions of Windows (everything past XP) do no have this problem.

    20. Re:Popularity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is still superior to Windows by lightyears

      And so long as you continue to believe this lie, that's all that really matters. Continue to use GNU/Linux knowing that you've made the "superior" choice, and that makes you a "superior" person.

    21. Re:Popularity by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      Take in account that OS X has a very specific audience, people that like the point and click and then click again procedure and that's how far they can get.

      Oh bullshit. I use terminal on my OSX machine as much as on my Linux boxes, except for compiling from source.

      OSX is indeed the shiniest version of Unix, and I use it just like my Linux machines. Just because gramma can use an OS X machine doesn't mean it isn't every bit as capable as any other computer out there.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    22. Re: Popularity by unapersson · · Score: 1

      Have we inherited this "power users" term from Windows or something? I remember those guys, always tweaking the GUI to optimise their workflow. Looks like some things never change.

    23. Re:Popularity by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 1

      Absolutely untrue. For a fresh Windows 7 install, generally I would agree. But for anyhting over a month old the UI performs miserably, redraws poorly and is generally as bad as Gnome 2.0. And that's just UI performance. It still lacks a proper shell environment without installing 3rd party hacks, is a total memory whore and doesn't scale well with load.

    24. Re: Popularity by plazman30 · · Score: 1

      Have you used Gnome lately? It may have been an inferior experience back when 3.0 came out, but with 3.16 out door, it's a completely different beast. Gnome is my preferred DE now, and I've tried them all at this point. In 2015 alone I've used gnome, xfce, kde plasma 5, cinnamon and lxde. Once you use tweak tool to allow apps to minimize, you're golden.

  2. Design Decisions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nice work, KDE team! I like that you haven't strayed from the traditional desktop workflow. I particularly like the menu.

    The Media Center functionality looks pretty sweet - seems like that would make a great living room box. I can't seem to find DVR features (somebody correct me if they are in fact available) - that'd be a killer feature.

  3. Re: Still ugly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    KDE has great aesthetics. Its UI is very usable, unlike the hipster monstrosities known as GNOME 3 and Unity. The KDE devs are smart, and know that throwing away decades of acquired knowledge and experience is a dumb idea. They don't change the KDE UI in stupid ways every week just to be trendy or to try to support every single possible screen size and form factor with just a single UI. The best software UIs are always the ones with the fewest, or even no, hipsters involved. These UIs are actually sensible and usable because they aren't riddled with the idiotic misconceptions about usability that hipster "user experience experts" believe.

  4. FINALLY! - A touchpad configuration module by virtualXTC · · Score: 1

    FTA: "A touchpad configuration module has been added" This is the one configuration took that has been missing from KDE since the upgrade from 3.5. The activities based power management is also a long awaited feature (turn off powersaving / sleep / hybernate when in presentation mode). Other than that the rest appears to be eye candy. Still waiting for automatic activity settings based on locally sensed wifi.... (I still need to manually change my external monitor setting every time I get into work / home).

    1. Re:FINALLY! - A touchpad configuration module by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Posting anonymously not to blow-up moderations.

      KDE 4 does have a touchpad configuration module, in Debian Jessie (newly stable ;) just install the package kde-config-touchpad. YMMV for other distros, but it's likely Ubuntu and variants have a similar package at least (not checked).

    2. Re:FINALLY! - A touchpad configuration module by marsu_k · · Score: 1

      Have you tried installing Kscreen? You should probably find it for whatever distribution you are using. It seems to be good at remembering different external monitor settings, just plug in the cable and you're good to go.

  5. Good! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Another repugnant desktop that I won't touch with the proverbial ten foot pole.

  6. Looks like Lollypop by saigon_from_europe · · Score: 1

    Is it only me, or it looks like Android Lollipop?

    --
    No sig today.
    1. Re:Looks like Lollypop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lollipop looks like plasma 5

    2. Re:Looks like Lollypop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I thought it looked like Windows 8. My God, who out there actually likes that shitty "minimal-look" or whatever it's called these days that they're shoving into every UI? GEOS on the Commodore looked better.

    3. Re:Looks like Lollypop by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      I hate "modern" crap that's "modern" for the sake of it, but just from screenshots I believe it looks a lot better than KDE 4.
      I also suppose you can run it without OpenGL, with disabled animations etc. so it should be usable.
      Doesn't mean I'll switch to it, as it is a pain to get whole new set of applications (file manager, pdf reader, terminal etc.)

    4. Re:Looks like Lollypop by chmod+a+x+mojo · · Score: 1

      Try it out, one really good thing about KDE is that you can set just about anything to be the default program quite easily through systemsettings, the KDE "control center".

      For example; if you like Firefox, Thunar, and Gnome terminal you can easily set all of them to be the default programs used for internet / file browsing / and terminal emulators. Same for PDF readers ETC.

      That said Dolphin / Konqueror, and Konsole are really quite full featured programs. Especially the file browsers, using KIOSlaves for input / output to practically everything is really awesome.

      --
      To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
    5. Re:Looks like Lollypop by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

      I see, there's the "Preferred Applications" applet under Mate (and maybe Cinnamon) that allows about the same and it is a godsend.
      You can set the default program for sound files and default program for video, separate (if I want the playlist-based music player, I open it separately with one click). Nice, quick and gets rid of the totem video player.
      I believe that's about the one feature Mate gained over old Gnome 2, along with a "control center" that sums up the stuff in "Preferences" and "Administration" menus, and few/subtle file manager improvements.

  7. Havent tried KDE since high school by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Which was ~2000. whats it like now? my favorite were blackbox and enlightenment. i come from mac os x now for many years, because of unix/bsd and stability. but i like linux and use it every day in Terminal. i dont like bloat or whitespace and and i like information density.

    1. Re: Havent tried KDE since high school by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      KDE has information density.

  8. Still Qt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It is also based on Qt, which is another major loss.

    1. Re:Still Qt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is also based on Qt, which is another major loss.

      I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or trolling :)

  9. Re:Still ugly by Teun · · Score: 1

    God am I glad I don't have your sight deficiency :)

    --
    "The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
  10. Re:Still ugly by thunderbird32 · · Score: 1

    Historically I've really, really disliked the default KDE theme, but I think Plasma 5 looks pretty good. Very clean.

  11. Grey text on grey bg. Missing/inconsistent chrome by munch117 · · Score: 1

    I really appreciate how the designers have gone out of their way to make me hate it on sight. With just a few choice usability bloopers on the first screenshot I see, they've ensured that I will never, ever consider it for anything. I am spared any ambivalence, spared from wasting any time trying it out or even reading reviews.

    Thank you, KDE designers! I am in your debt!

  12. New thing released? by Merk42 · · Score: 1

    Oh boy, new version of $software came out! Better run to /. and comment on how it's terrible to the point of equating it to killing puppies! I will also speak volumes of what it is doing wrong, because of course my preference is therefore the preference of everyone. Yet with all this knowledge of what people truley want I won't ever make a better version of $software myself.

  13. Most wanted feature by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Built-in ability to hide the "cashew", which is now a rectangle. C'mon, what's it been, 10 years now? Nobody likes a weird intrusive UI element that serves no purpose at all for 90% of the users. Even Microsoft got that memo by now.

    1. Re:Most wanted feature by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      that ability is already there it's called 'lock widgets' (you use it once you've finished setting everything up to your preferences)

  14. Why the split personality? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    One thing I've never understood about KDE, since KDE 4, is why it has an artificial separation between Plasma and traditional KDE apps. Why do Plasmoids have to have their own separate visual style? It's very jarring, and it made KDE 4's visual appearance much less configurable than KDE 3's by introducing a Gnome-style system of requiring users to choose from ready-made and unconfigurable Plasma themes (or develop their own).

    I understand that Plasmoids are supposed to be easier to write than traditional applications, but I don't understand why that means they have to have ugly themes and stand out like a sore thumb against the "real" apps. I'd like to see a return to a situation where the buttons, scrollbars and other theme elements in desktop widgets and panels conform to the overall widget style that's been selected for traditional applications. It surprises me that none of the developers appear to have identified this lack of consistency as a problem yet.

    One of these days, when I've got more time on my hands, and if nobody beats me to it, I'll try to do some work on fixing this problem.

  15. oh boy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    gnome 2.3 or 2.6 looked very damn sharp on the old red hat distro. Even kde 3xx looked nice compared to today's gnome and kde. Kde 5xx looks like a windows 8 reject that just strains the eyes even more. Don't know why they are following Microsoft ugly graphics.

  16. Congratulations! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Dear KDE team(s) members and contributors,

    Thank you for your dedication and all your effort to this amazing DE!
    While with Debian Jessie we're on platform 4.14, many of us look forward to the 5.x series ;-)

    Again, thank you!

  17. GREY, GREY, GREY! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And 'flat' icons. How sickeningly pathetic. Can't they think up something original? Why are they blindly copying bad design from other OSes?

  18. Ugly but improving window manager by Theovon · · Score: 1

    I've been saying for years that plasmoids (with their rounded corners and translucency and other cool effects) look neat, but the window manager looks terrible, because it doesn't fit in with the rest of the theme. It looks like they've been improving it a bit. It's still not totally seamless, but it's way better than it was a few years ago.

    So, I have a question: KDE seems like a more technlogically advanced desktop system and it's more pleasant to look at than GNOME. What is the appeal of sticking to GNOME as the default in distros like Ubuntu?