KDE Plasma 5.15 Released (kde.org)

jrepin writes: Today, KDE launched Plasma 5.15, the first stable release of the popular desktop environment in 2019. For this release the Plasma team has focused on hunting down and removing all the paper cuts that slow you down. Plasma 5.15 brings a number of changes to the configuration interfaces, including more options for complex network configurations. Many icons have been added or redesigned to make them clearer. Integration with third-party technologies like GTK and Firefox has been improved substantially. Discover, Plasma's software and add-on installer, has received tons of improvements to help you stay up-to-date and find the tools you need to get your tasks done. For a more detailed list of features/changes, you can browse the full Plasma 5.15 changelog.

Comments

KDE Neon

[Maelwryth]

Got to say I am enjoying it! Thanks KDE.

Re:KDE Neon

[arglebargle_xiv]

For this release the Plasma team has focused on hunting down and removing all the paper cuts that slow you down.

How about hunting down and removing, with extreme prejudice, the flat-tard UI they copied from Windows 8 because, you know, it worked so well for Microsoft? That's something that's newsworthy, not a bump of the minor version number.

Re: KDE Neon

[zwarte piet]

Engineering more crashes in Linux and KDE just to be more equal to Win10 is not gonna happen soon, but you have the source code. Be creative...!

Re:KDE Neon

[caseih]

To me the default UI theme in Plasma these days looks far more like MacOS than Windows 8/10. Also there are plenty of Plasma themes (which use Qt themes to style the widgets) available to make the desktop look to your liking. Of course many Linux themes for Qt and GTK copy other platforms, but in general Windows clones aren't very popular.

Better but still glitchy

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE has improved drastically from the KDE 4 shitshow, but it still feels unfinished and glitchy.

Also, while again things have improved, the multi-monitor experience in particular still feels half-baked. It has a fancy new prompt when it detects new monitors.. and it shows up _sometimes_, and works _sometimes_, but then other times it doesn't. Also trying to get a panel on each monitor feels like boxing with your computer. You want it on the left screen, it _insists_ on being on the right. You finally trick it into being on the right, you reboot, and it's back on the left.. or on the top maybe.

Also SDDM sends Microsoft-y chills down my spine even more so than their application chooser. I mean KDE was always the "Windows clone", but yeesh. This isn't even subtle.

Re:Better but still glitchy

[Anrego]

It's not even just plasma. The xfce4 panel is the only thing I've ever found to sanely handle my multi-monitor setup, and even then only just. I currently run it with openbox, and that's been my basic setup for the last several years.
At the insistence of a few people, I recently gave plasma a try (within the last month), and yeah, while much better than KDE4, it's still not there. I think I'm ready to accept a well integrated desktop environment into my life and wouldn't mind changing my workflow a little if everything mostly just work and I could tweak the little things that I really care about. Despite giving it a few weeks however, I just couldn't warm up to it. No one big thing, just a lot of little things that made the experience feel like it was still an unpolished pre-release.

Re:Better but still glitchy

[youngone]

I feel pretty much the same. I tried several KDE distros and after a few months switched to Ubuntu with their Gnome setup.
It was kind of death by a thousand cuts. Not awful, just not quite right.

Re: Better but still glitchy

[Anonymous Coward]

The amount of damage KDE4 did to their reputation is unreal. It wasn't so much that it was premature as that it was chock full of bad ideas. It was basically a gigantic misstep in every possible direction. They released something that was completely unusable, and was designed so poorly that it took forever to even reach shitty.

Plasma pretty much represents a reversal of most of those ideas. It's not so much that the software matured and the bugs were worked out, as that they realized the horrible mistakes they'd made with KDE4 and gutted it. It'll take time, but people are starting to see plasma as a viable option.

Re:Better but still glitchy

[rl117]

Still not up there at the KDE3 level, but definitely better than KDE4. For me, KDE3 was and still is the pinnacle of desktop user interfaces. Functional, fast, usable and looked nice. And had a lot of very nice applications to go with it.

Re: Better but still glitchy

[Anonymous Coward]

Having used KDE from 3.x to the present day, I'm curious as to what metaphors or options in the KDE 4 desktop you find so bad. What did they reversed? Defaults, thats pretty much it. Of course that was 10 years ago.

From what I can see, the entire desktop in Plasma 5 is more or less the same as KDE4, except default options and more configurability.

The problem as others have stated was KDE4 was a test bed and not ready at 4.0, and the KDE developers said this repeatedly but OS distros abandoned KD3 and jumped on 4 WAY too quickly.

Whatever, each to their own. What i find interesting is the amount of hate poured onto projects that people don't use. Don't like it? Great! Stop complaining. Plasma has been a viable option for a long time. As stable as Gnome. Better multi-monitor support. Great OSD.

Re:Better but still glitchy

[Gavagai80]

KDE 3 was great, but I think Gnome 1 was the best. So many options, it really let the user tweak everything. You could even switch window managers on a whim through the GUI choosing among a half dozen options that all worked great. We'll never get a desktop designed for that kind of flexibility again.

Re:plagued by semi freezing multple pcs

[Anonymous Coward]

Long shot of it being the same problem, but I just finished tracking down something similar. Problem was I wasn't running a notification daemon, and pasystray was trying to send notifications on every volume change, which somehow managed to eventually jam up the entire environment for several minutes at a time (there are many things wrong with all of this..).

kdid kthey kfix kthe kbug kwhere...

[apparently]

kevery kfucking kapplication's kname kstarts kwith ka kk?

Re: kdid kthey kfix kthe kbug kwhere...

[Gavagai80]

Dolphins aren't fish.

Re:kdid kthey kfix kthe kbug kwhere...

[Anonymous Coward]

which would be a lot more efficient to google than 'plasma' and 'neon'.

Re:plagued by semi freezing multple pcs

[rl117]

It's not ubuntu is it? I've experienced the same for a few years now. Tried several different graphics cards, to no avail. I suspect it might be the compositor; I hear the GPU fans speed up during the freeze and wonder if it's a GPU lockup and reset after a timeout.

If I run vmware workstation, it happens every few minutes, and sometimes locks up the machine. I suspect this is a separate locking bug somewhere, but it might interact badly with X due to grabbing the input focus. Filed several tickets with them over the years, but it's never been resolved either.

Re: plagued by semi freezing multple pcs

[Maelwryth]

Try changing your c state to 1 in bios. I have had a few problems with that freezing the computer in the past.