The KDE Community just announced the release of KDE Plasma 5.5 Beta, which brings a ton of new features and significant changes.
The KDE Plasma desktop has been going through a metamorphosis thins past year, and it looks like things are finally settling down. We’re passed the big design changes, and now developers are trying to improve and refine the experience.
Like many of the previous updates for Plasma, the 5.5 Beta release is a big one. It’s even difficult to point out some of the most important since there are so many of them, but we can see that the Breeze Plasma theme has received more attention and that the application launcher has been expanded.
KDE Plasma 5.5 Beta is ready for testing
Since this is a Beta release, we won’t be able to find it in repositories, unless we’re on Arch, for example, but that doesn’t really matter. At the rate these developers are working, we’re going to have a stable version of Plasma soon.
“Today KDE releases a beta of next month’s new feature update, 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,” wrote the developers in the official announcement.
According to the changelog, the Plasma Widget explorer now supports a two-column view, a number of Plasma addons have been added, the support for legacy applications that were not using the StatusNotifier standard for system tray icons has been rewritten, switching to OpenGL ES in KWin is possible again, a basic Wayland session is provided, and many more other features have been implemented.
In fact, besides all of these goodies, developers also fixed more than 1000 bugs, which is a huge number for a project like this one. As usual, you can download KDE Plasma 5.5 Beta source package if you want to compile it yourself, but it would be a better idea to get it from the official repos of your distribution.
Via Softpedia