KDE developer Kai Uwe has just published a lengthy article where he talks about developing a Windows 8-inspired theme for the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.5 desktop environment.
For some of you, this might sound like an April 1 prank, but we have the proof to show you. So if you don’t want to read the following article, jump straight to the video at the end to see the upcoming Metro-like theme for KDE Plasma 5.5, due for release next week, on December 8, 2015.
Long story short, Kai Uwe is now working on a new project called U-Bahn (short for Untergrundbahn, meaning “underground railway” in German), and designed from the ground up as a desktop theme for KDE Plasma 5 that looks and feels like the Metro UI of the Microsoft Windows 8 operating system.
“I’ve seen Plasma setups resembling Unity, or Gnome Shell, or OS/2, but I haven’t seen Windows 8 yet,” said Kai Uwe. “This is an experimental Metro-inspired (Metro, U-Bahn, get it?) sidebar. Its name kinda shows how serious I was about this. Anyhow, it’s a nice showcase of Plasma’s flexibility. The whole thing took me just over an hour to get up and running.”
Proof of concept only
According to Mr. Uwe, the Metro-inspired theme will not be publicly available for the KDE Plasma 5.5 or upcoming releases of the popular open-source desktop environment. However, the project opens up a new path in the flexibility of the KDE Plasma project, which means that developers can try to create some awesome, unique themes for it in the near future.
Whether you’re a KDE user or developer, we strongly recommend that you read Mr. Uwe’s latest blog post to find out what other goodies are hiding in the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.5, KDE Applications 15.12, and KDE Frameworks 5.17.0 technologies, which will be released in December 2015. And now for the video we’ve promised at the beginning of the article. Enjoy!
Via Softpedia