14 DAY TRIAL // KDE Plasma 5.6 Beta has been announced by the KDE community, marking the start of a new development cycle for the desktop.
The new KDE Plasma 5.x branch wasn't all that well received by users when it was initially launched, but the developers continued to improve upon it. This latest 5.6 Beta release shows just how far the project has come. The progress made by the developers is astounding, and it looks like they are still making significant changes.
It has happened more than once that some features that were removed from Plasma return to the desktop, and the same can be observed for the current iteration. It’s nothing major, but at least, it shows that the developers are listening to the community.
KDE Plasma 5.6 Beta is now ready for testing
This new version of Plasma comes only two days after the debut of the stable version, 5.5. That was a simple maintenance version, with just a few fixes, but KDE Plasma 5.6 is a much more impressive launch.
"Today KDE releases a beta update to its desktop software, Plasma 5.6. This release of Plasma brings many improvements to the task manager, KRunner, activities, and Wayland support as well as a much more refined look and feel," developers explain.
The team adds that the default Breeze Plasma theme is now following the color scheme, a new "Breeze Light" theme has been added, the task manager now shows the progress of tasks, like downloading or copying, and hovering a music or video player now displays the album art and media controls.
Also, some of the widgets have been refined, the Weather widget has been added again to Plasma, and more improvements have landed for Wayland integration.
As usual, you can download KDE Plasma 5.6 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.