Changes/Plasma 5

Plasma 5

Summary

Plasma 5 is successor to KDE Plasma 4 created by the KDE Community. It is based on Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 and brings many changes and improvements over previous versions, including new look & feel as well as important changes under the hood.

Owner

KDE SIG

• Names: Daniel Vrátil, Lukáš Tinkl, Jan Grulich, Rex Dieter
• Email: dvratil@redhat.com, jgrulich@redhat.com, ltinkl@redhat.com, rdieter@fedoraproject.org
• Release notes owner:

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 22
• Last updated: 2014-01-09
• Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

Plasma 5 is a new major version of KDE's workspaces. It has a new theme called Breeze, which has cleaner visuals and better readability. While Plasma 5 has improved certain work-flows, the core interaction patterns are left intact. Plasma 5 improves support for high-DPI displays and ships a converged shell, able to switch between user experiences for different devices.

Changes under the hood include switch to Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 and migration to fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack based on OpenGL(ES).

Note that Plasma 5 only includes the actual shell, decorations, icons and a few applications coupled with workspace (e.g. KWin, System Settings, KSysGuard). It does not include "regular" applications like Dolphin, Okular, Konqueror, etc. which are part of KDE Applications product and released independently of Plasma 5.

Plasma 5 gets a new feature release every three months, and each feature release has monthly bugfix releases. Plasma 5.2 is scheduled to be released on January 27. KDE SIG intends to ship Plasma 5.2.2 or Plasma 5.3, depending on the final schedules.

Benefit to Fedora

KDE is a popular, feature rich and stable desktop environment used by a lot of Fedora users. Plasma 5 brings the latest release of KDE workspace yet to Fedora.

Scope

• Proposal owners:
  • Submit, review and import new packages for Plasma 5 to rawhide/F22
  • Modify existing KDE 4 packages to ensure smooth upgrade path to Plasma 5

• Other developers:

Optionally, maintainers or 3rd party KDE Workspace 4 packages such as Plasma applets or KCMs may want to check upstream for Qt 5/Frameworks versions of their packages and update them.

• Release engineering:

No, this change requires no coordination with rel-eng.

• Policies and guidelines:

No, this change requires no update to packaging guidelines or policies.

Upgrade/compatibility impact

Plasma 5 is not coinstallable with KDE Workspace 4 and is treated as an update instead. Users with KDE 4 installed will be updated to Plasma 5 through regular update mechanism without any need for manual intervention. KDE SIG will work to make sure the upgrade path is smooth for all users. Configuration files will be migrated automatically by kconfupdate and by individual applications after first login to Plasma 5.

How To Test

Latest stable versions of Plasma 5 are currently available in dvratil/plasma-5 COPR and KDE SIG is working on importing the packages to Fedora rawhide/22.

Testing can be done on any hardware. Since Plasma 5 requires hardware acceleration, KDE SIG is interested in collecting feedback from as many different GPUs and drivers as possible to ensure Plasma 5 performs well on wide variaty of hardware.

Individual components of Plasma 5 can be tested by simply installing Plasma 5 and using it,

User Experience

N/A (not a System Wide Change)

Dependencies

Plasma 5 depends most notably on Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 packages, all of which are already available in Fedora.

• Contingency mechanism: Rolling back to KDE 4 and shipping KDE Workspace 4.11.X. As rawhide would already have packages with version 5.x.y, we would have to increase the epoch number of all affected KDE 4 packages.
• Contingency deadline: TODO Beta??
• Blocks release? No
• Blocks product? No

Documentation

• Plasma 5.0 release announcement
• Plasma 5.1 release announcement

Release Notes

TODO