It’s been nearly three months since the KDE Plasma 5.4 desktop environment has been released, during which it received two maintenance builds, and a third one is about to be unveiled in the next 24 hours or so.
KDE Plasma 5.4.3 is expected on November 10, 2015, if everything goes according to plan, and it is the last in the series, as the developers will now concentrate all of their efforts on adding more cool new features to the next major release, KDE Plasma 5.5.
We’ve written a few articles here on Softpedia about some of the upcoming features that are to be implemented in the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.5 desktop environment, but in this article we want to share with you even more of them.
According to Jan Grulich, an Associate Software Engineer working at Red Hat Czech in a small team responsible for the KDE implementation in Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, KDE Plasma 5.5 is approaching feature freeze, on November 19, 2015.
In the same day, the first Beta build of KDE Plasma 5.5 will hit the streets, available for anyone willing to take it for a test drive (a detailed article will be available on the release day here on Softpedia).
But until then, let’s find out what else is new in KDE Plasma 5.5. Shall we? Let’s start with plasma-nm (KDE Plasma’s Network Manager applet), which received support for WPA/WPA2 Enterprise validation, a new password field widget, tooltips to most common options, OpenVPN improvements, and various bugfixes.
“This time we have major changes only in our connection editor although most of you wouldn’t probably even notice them,” said Jan Grulich. “This is going to be a short list unfortunately given I have less time and less ideas, but at least something, right?”
Breeze and Oxygen icon sets get new features too
On the other hand, another KDE developer writes on his blog about the work done by him on improving the Breeze and Oxygen icon sets for KDE Plasma 5.5. As such, he managed to add support for three icon sets by one single click.
Additionally, both Breeze icons and Oxygen icons have been moved to KDE Frameworks 5, which means that starting with KDE Plasma 5.5, users will receive monthly updates of these beautiful icon sets.
“In Plasma 5 the user can decide which icon set the applications should use and so my goal is that plasma can support three icon sets by one single click. The future will show if we can reach this goal,” said the developer.
KDE Plasma 5.5 arrives on December 8
As mentioned, KDE Plasma 5.5 Beta (5.4.95 will be the actual version number) will be released next week, on November 19, but the final release of KDE Plasma 5.5 should land on December 8, 2015.
The good news is that KDE Plasma 5.5 will receive five maintenance versions, KDE Plasma 5.5.1 and KDE Plasma 5.5.2 on on December 15 and December 20, 2015 respectively, KDE Plasma 5.5.3 and KDE Plasma 5.5.4 on January 5 and January 26, 2016 respectively.
The development cycle of KDE Plasma 5.5 will be concluded with KDE Plasma 5.5.5, due for release on March 1, 2016, but until then, we will enjoy one of the greatest desktop environments ever created for GNU/Linux operating systems.
Via Softpedia