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, Than Ngo, Kevin Kofler

• Email: dvratil@redhat.com, jgrulich@redhat.com, ltinkl@redhat.com, rdieter@fedoraproject.org, than@redhat.com, kevin@tigcc.ticalc.org
• Release notes owner:

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 22
• Last updated: 2014-01-20
• Tracker bug: #1191067

• Plasma 5 Tracker: plasma5
• Currently imported ~18 packages, ~8 packages are waiting for review or to be imported
• Some packages are missing a port to Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 or they are already being ported and were not officially released

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, improves certain work-flows and provides overal more consistent and polished interface.

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
  • Retire KDE 4 packages not compatible with Plasma 5, or available in Plasma 5 under different names/components

• Other developers:

Optionally, maintainers of 3rd party KDE Workspace 4 packages such as Plasma applets or KCMs may want to consult upstream regarding Qt 5/Frameworks versions of their packages, and eventually update them to Frameworks version, so that they are available in Plasma 5.

• 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 Plasma 5.2 beta (5.1.95) is available in dvratil/plasma-5-beta Copr. We recommend testing the 5.2 beta as it's much closer to what will land in Fedora 22. KDE SIG is currently working on importing the Plasma 5 packages from Copr 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

KDE 4 users will find Plasma 5 environment familiar and will have no troubles orienting in the new environment. Although Plasma 5 improves and streamlines certain work-flows, the core patterns are left intact. The user interface is more polished and consistent than it was in KDE 4, which makes Plasma 5 easier to use and adopt by new users.

Plasma 5 supports only applets written in QML 2 or C++, so KDE 4 applets written in QML1, JavaScript, Python or other scripting languages supported in KDE 4 will not work. This means that some users might find that their favourite applets are not available in Plasma 5 yet. Most of the core applets shipped with KDE 4 has already been ported and are available in Plasma 5, but mostly 3rd party applets are not available for Plasma 5 yet. This should change in future as Plasma 5 gains wider adoption amongst users and developers.

Dependencies

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

Contingency Plan

• 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, and making them Obsolete their Plasma 5 equivalents (since some Plasma 5 packages have been renamed or split from larger KDE 4 packages)
• Contingency deadline: Before F22 beta freeze
• Blocks release? No
• Blocks product? No

Documentation

• Plasma 5.0 release announcement
• Plasma 5.1 release announcement

Release Notes

TODO