KDE Ships Plasma 5.2

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Tuesday, 27 January 2015. Today KDE releases Plasma 5.2. This release adds a number of new components, many new features and many more bugfixes.

New Components



KScreen dual monitor setup KScreen dual monitor setup

This release of Plasma comes with some new components to make your desktop even more complete:

BlueDevil: a range of desktop components to manage Bluetooth devices. It'll set up your mouse, keyboard, send & receive files and you can browse for devices.

KSSHAskPass: if you access computers with ssh keys but those keys have passwords this module will give you a graphical UI to enter those passwords.

Muon: install and manage software and other addons for your computer.

Login theme configuration (SDDM): SDDM is now the login manager of choice for Plasma and this new System Settings module allows you to configure the theme.

KScreen: getting its first release for Plasma 5 is the System Settings module to set up multiple monitor support.

GTK Application Style: this new module lets you configure themeing of applications from Gnome.

KDecoration: this new library makes it easier and more reliable to make themes for KWin, Plasma's window manager. It has impressive memory, performance and stability improvements. If you are missing a feature don't worry it'll be back in Plasma 5.3.

Other highlights

Undo changes to Plasma desktop layout



Undo changes to desktop layout Undo changes to desktop layout

Smarter sorting of results in KRunner, press Alt-space to easily search through your computer



Smart sorting in KRunner Smart sorting in KRunner

Breeze window decoration theme adds a new look to your desktop and is now used by default



New Breeze Window Decoration New Breeze Window Decoration

The artists in the visual design group have been hard at work on many new Breeze icons



More Breeze Icons More Breeze Icons

They are have added a new white mouse cursor theme for Breeze.

New plasma widgets: 15 puzzle, web browser, show desktop



Web browser plasmoid Web browser plasmoid

Audio Player controls in KRunner, press Alt-Space and type next to change music track

The Kicker alternative application menu can install applications from the menu and adds menu editing features.

Our desktop search feature Baloo sees optimisations on startup. It now consumes 2-3x less CPU on startup. The query parser supports "type" / "kind" properties, so you can type "kind:Audio" in krunner to filter out Audio results.

In the screen locker we improved the integration with logind to ensure the screen is properly locked before suspend. The background of the lock screen can be configured. Internally this uses part of the Wayland protocol which is the future of the Linux desktop.

There are improvements in the handling of multiple monitors. The detection code for multiple monitors got ported to use the XRandR extension directly and multiple bugs related to it were fixed.

Default applications in Kickoff panel menu have been updated to list Instant Messaging, Kontact and Kate.

There is a welcome return to the touchpad enable/disable feature for laptop keypads with these keys.

Breeze will set up GTK themes on first login to match.

Over 300 bugs fixed throughout Plasma modules.

Plasma modules 5.2 full changelog

Live Images

The easiest way to try it out is the with a live image booted off a USB disk. Images which use Plasma 5.2 beta are available for development versions of Kubuntu Vivid Beta and Fedora 21 remix. We expect Plasma 5 to be picked up as the default desktop in leading distributions in the coming months.

Package Downloads

Distributions have created, or are in the process of creating, packages listed on our wiki page.

Source Downloads

You can install Plasma 5 directly from source. KDE's community wiki has instructions to compile it. Note that Plasma 5 does not co-install with Plasma 4, you will need to uninstall older versions or install into a separate prefix.

Feedback

You can give us feedback and get updates on Facebook or Twitter or

Discuss Plasma 5 on the KDE Forums Plasma 5 board.

You can provide feedback direct to the developers via the #Plasma IRC channel, Plasma-devel mailing list or report issues via bugzilla. If you like what the team is doing, please let them know!

Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Supporting KDE

KDE is a Free Software community that exists and grows only because of the help of many volunteers that donate their time and effort. KDE is always looking for new volunteers and contributions, whether it is help with coding, bug fixing or reporting, writing documentation, translations, promotion, money, etc. All contributions are gratefully appreciated and eagerly accepted. Please read through the Supporting KDE page for further information or become a KDE e.V. supporting member through our Join the Game initiative.

About KDE

KDE is an international technology team that creates free and open source software for desktop and portable computing. Among KDE's products are a modern desktop system for Linux and UNIX platforms, comprehensive office productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of software titles in many categories including Internet and web applications, multimedia, entertainment, educational, graphics and software development. KDE software is translated into more than 60 languages and is built with ease of use and modern accessibility principles in mind. KDE's full-featured applications run natively on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows and macOS.

Trademark Notices. KDE® and the K Desktop Environment® logo are registered trademarks of KDE e.V. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks and copyrights referred to in this announcement are the property of their respective owners.

Press Contacts

For more information send us an email:

press@kde.org