KDE Ships Plasma 5.4.0, Feature Release for August

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Plasma 5.4

Tuesday, 25 August 2015. Today KDE releases a feature release of the new version of Plasma 5.

This release of Plasma brings many nice touches for our users such as much improved high DPI support, KRunner auto-completion and many new beautiful Breeze icons. It also lays the ground for the future with a tech preview of Wayland session available. We're shipping a few new components such as an Audio Volume Plasma Widget, monitor calibration tool and the User Manager tool comes out beta.

The new Audio Volume Applet

New Audio Volume Applet

Our new Audio Volume applet works directly with PulseAudio, the popular sound server for Linux, to give you full control over volume and output settings in a beautifully designed simple interface.

The new Dashboard alternative launcher

Application Dashboard alternative launcher

Plasma 5.4 brings an entirely new fullscreen launcher Application Dashboard in kdeplasma-addons: Featuring all features of Application Menu it includes sophisticated scaling to screen size and full spatial keyboard navigation. The new launcher allows you to easily and quickly find applications, as well as recently used or favorited documents and contacts based on your previous activity.

Just some of the new icons in this release

Artwork Galore

KRunner

KRunner history

KRunner now remembers your previous searches and automatically completes from the history as you type.

Network Graphs

Useful graphs in Networks applet

The Networks applet is now able to display network traffic graphs. It also supports two new VPN plugins for connecting over SSH or SSTP.

Wayland Technology Preview

With Plasma 5.4 the first technology preview of a Wayland session is released. On systems with free graphics drivers it is possible to run Plasma using KWin, Plasma's Wayland compositor and X11 window manager, through kernel mode settings. The currently supported feature set is driven by the needs for the Plasma Mobile project and more desktop oriented features are not yet fully implemented. The current state does not yet allow to use it as a replacement for Xorg based desktop, but allows to easily test it, contribute and watch tear free videos. Instructions on how to start Plasma on Wayland can be found in the KWin wiki pages. Wayland support will improve in future releases with the aim to get to a stable release soon.

Other changes and additions

Much improved high DPI support

Smaller memory footprint

Our desktop search got new and much faster backend

Sticky notes adds drag & drop support and keyboard navigation

Trash applet now works again with drag & drop

System tray gains quicker configurability

The documentation has been reviewed and updated

Improved layout for Digital clock in slim panels

ISO date support in Digital clock

New easy way to switch 12h/24h clock format in Digital clock

Week numbers in the calendar

Any type of item can now be favorited in Application Menu (Kicker) from any view, adding support for document and Telepathy contact favorites

Telepathy contact favorites show the contact photo and a realtime presence status badge

Improved focus and activation handling between applets and containment on the desktop

Various small fixes in Folder View: Better default sizes, fixes for mouse interaction issues, text label wrapping

The Task Manager now tries harder to preserve the icon it derived for a launcher by default

It's possible to add launchers by dropping apps on the Task Manager again

It's now possible to configure what happens when middle-clicking a task button in the Task Manager: Nothing, window close, or launching a new instance of the same app

The Task Manager will now sort column-major if the user forces more than one row; many users expected and prefer this sorting as it causes less task button moves as windows come and go

Improved icon and margin scaling for task buttons in the Task Manager

Various small fixes in the Task Manager: Forcing columns in vertical instance now works, touch event handling now works on all systems, fixed a visual issue with the group expander arrow

Provided the Purpose framework tech preview is available, the QuickShare Plasmoid can be used, making it easy to share files on many web services.

Monitor configuration tool added

kwallet-pam is added to open your wallet on login

User Manager now syncs contacts to KConfig settings and the User Account module has gone away

Performance improvements to Application Menu (Kicker)

Various small fixes to Application Menu (Kicker): Hiding/unhiding apps is more reliable, alignment fixes for top panels, 'Add to Desktop' against a Folder View containment is more reliable, better behavior in the KActivities-based Recent models

Support for custom menu layouts (through kmenuedit) and menu separator items in Application Menu (Kicker)

Folder View has improved mode when in panel (blog)

Dropping a folder on the Desktop containment will now offer creating a Folder View again

Live Images

Plasma 5.4 brings over 1400 new icons covering not only all the KDE applications, but also providing Breeze themed artwork to apps such as Inkscape, Firefox and LibreOffice providing a more integrated, native feel.

The easiest way to try it out is with a live image booted off a USB disk. You can find a list of Live Images with Plasma 5 on the KDE Community Wiki.

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.

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