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KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS Desktop Officially Released (softpedia.com)
prisoninmate writes from a report via Softpedia: KDE will celebrate 20 years of activity on October 14, 2016, and they've just released the first LTS (Long Term Support) version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment. Prominent new features of KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS include support for desktop widgets, a new system-wide search functionality that promises to let users easily search their KDE desktops for everything they want, including apps, music, videos, files, folders, etc., a new tool to get hot new stuff for your KDE Plasma desktop, such as wallpapers, widgets, desktop effects, or window styles, and infinite customization possibilities. Moreover, KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS comes with a unified look for the default Breeze theme so that, no matter what type of application you're using (Qt4, GTK2, GTK3, or Qt5), it will look the same, mobile phone notifications, along with the ability to use your smartphone as a PC remote, transfer files or mute music during calls, all with the new KDE Connect plasmoid. There's also Right-to-Left (RTL) language support, simplified global shortcuts, improvements to many applets, and much better Wayland support. KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS will receive nine point releases until 2018. "Today KDE releases its first Long Term Support edition of its flagship desktop software, Plasma," reads the announcement. "This marks the point where the developers and designers are happy to recommend Plasma for the widest possible audience be they enterprise or non-techy home users. If you tried a KDE desktop previously and have moved away, now is the time to re-assess, Plasma is simple by default, powerful when needed."
KDE was never meant to be a Windows 95 clone. It was originally made to look like the Common Desktop Environment from 1993.
Baloo has replaced nepomuk and is much better behaved. Akonadi and Telepathy are frequent sources of frustration for me though. Also, the Network Manager can crash all Plasma widgets and window decorations, which is very annoying—I don't know if this is an OpenSuse or KDE bug. As I mentioned a couple months ago (modded +5!), it remains the least annoying DE for me.
First thing I have to do after installing KDE is kill the baloo semantic desktop search indexer to stop it from using 100% of the CPU.
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