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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.

1 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. 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.