Today, December 8, the KDE project will officially unveil the latest and most advanced version of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems.
KDE Plasma 5.5 includes a lot of new features, designed to drastically enhance the overall user experience. Just by looking at the video attached at the end of the article, we can say that KDE Plasma is now mature enough to be deployed by default in production-ready GNU/Linux operating systems.
"Tuesday, 8 December 2015. Today KDE releases a feature update to its desktop software, Plasma 5.5. We have been working hard over the last four months to smooth off the rough edges, add useful new workflows, make Plasma even more beautiful and build the foundations for the future," said the KDE developers.
Prominent features of KDE Plasma 5.5 include enhanced activity switcher user interface, the addition of a new Activity Pager applet, updated Breeze Plasma theme, which is now more consistent and improves the visual design, along with the implementation of a two column view for the Plasma Widget Explorer.
Furthermore, KDE Plasma 5.5 re-implements the Color Picker applet, which now boasts a revamped interface, adds support for accessing the User Switcher applet from the Application Launcher, adds an all-new Disk Quota applet for viewing allowed quota and overall usage, as well as re-implementation of support for legacy tray icons.
KDE Plasma's Application Launcher received many improvements
KDE Plasma 5's Application Launcher, Kickoff, received a lot of attention in this release. Among the newly added features, we can mention support for listing recently opened documents in an app in the context menu, support for editing the menu entries for applications, as well as support for folder, documents, and system actions in Favorites.
The KDE Plasma software installer finally received the ovehaul that it needs for usability improvements, support for switching to OpenGL ES has been re-implemented in the KWin window manager, and there's now a basic, more mature and secure Wayland session.
Last but not least, KDE Plasma 5.5 has a new default font, which you can see in the gallery attached at the end of the article, adds a status module for the file indexer, greatly improved the Plasma Networkmanager with WPA/WPA2 Enterprise validation, new password field widget, and more OpenVPN options.
KDE Plasma 5.5 with all of its awesome new features will be officially released later today, December 8, 2015, but it will take a few days for the new packages to land in the default software repositories of your GNU/Linux operating system, so make sure that you always keep your OS up to date.
