14 DAY TRIAL // The KDE Community just announced that Plasma, the desktop for the KDE project, is now at version 5.1.2 and it comes with a large array of changes, improvements, and various fixes.
The KDE project is going through some changes and developers decided to split all the components in KDE Applications and Platform, KDE Frameworks, and KDE Plasma.
This means that there won't be a single KDE SC release, with the same version for all the components. Now, Plasma 5.1.2 has been made available, and KDE Frameworks has a completely different version, not to mention KDE Applications and Platform.
In theory, this will allow developers to make releases much more often because they don't have to wait around for something to be finished, from another part of the project.
It also opens the gate for some interesting integration problems and distro developers will certainly encounter some issues. It's also likely that regular users will also have a hard time keeping track of their favorite versions as well.
The new Plasma desktop is a maintenance update
Even if this new branch of the Plasma desktop has been declared stable for quite some time, no major distribution has adopted it just yet. It's very likely that the next Kubuntu to arrive in April 2015, will feature Plasma by default, although it's quite possible that until then other smaller OSes will also get it.
"Today KDE releases a bugfix update to Plasma 5, versioned 5.1.2. Plasma 5.1 was released in October with many feature refinements and streamlining the existing codebase of KDE's popular desktop for developers to work on for the years to come. This release adds a month's worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors," is noted in the announcement.
The developers have also explained that the vertical alignment has been fixed, the "Forget App" function is finally working properly, the default cursor is now the bouncing one, the Breeze theme has been updated, Plasma Workspace has been upgraded, and KWin now requires OpenGL 2.0.
The new KDE Plasma update will take a while to land in repositories, but Arch Linux and Kubuntu (the Plasma 5 edition) should be among the first to get the new desktop. You can also download the latest KDE Plasma 5.1.2 source packages from Softpedia or you can try Kubuntu 14.10 with Plasma 5 as a Live CD, if you want to see what the fuss is all about.
