14 DAY TRIAL // We reported a few days ago that the April update of openSUSE Tumbleweed will switch to the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment by default. Today, we have some more news regarding the transition to KDE Plasma 5 in openSUSE.
openSUSE Tumbleweed/Factory is a rolling-release version of OpenSuSE, where all the new technologies get implemented before they land in the main openSUSE distribution.
In a recent blog post, openSUSE contributor Luca Beltrame brought some more light into the switch to the KDE Plasma 5 as the default desktop environment on the next openSUSE release.
We were extremely happy to see that Softpedia got mentioned there and that everything we wrote about the upcoming transition to KDE Plasma 5 in openSUSE got confirmed. Best of all, there's a new Live ISO image available for testing, which includes the KDE Plasma 5 desktop.
"You may have read in a recent Softpedia article that Plasma 5 is going to become the default in openSUSE. That’s correct (what did you expect, a retraction?" says Luca Beltrame.
"I and the others of the team (Raymond and Hrvoje) have been using Plasma 5 for a long time, not only because we like to stay on the bleeding edge but also to see how it would fare for openSUSE."
All the KDE4 applications we love are included
Therefore, we've downloaded the openSUSE Live KDE Plasma image, which is based on the current Tumbleweed distro dated April 3, 2015, in order to see for ourselves what the KDE Plasma 5 desktop will look like in openSUSE.
We are happy with how KDE Plasma 5 looks in all Linux distributions, and the openSUSE implementation is no different. The flat, modern style of the desktop is very futuristic compared with the KDE4 one. Please enjoy the screenshot tour below!
All the KDE4 applications we love are included, such as Amarok, K3b, digiKam, KTorrent, Dolphin, and many more. The Live CD is powered by the latest Linux 3.19.3 kernel, which means that you can test it on newer machines without any issues.
Luca Beltrame says that the team thinks that the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.3 environment is mature enough to become the default openSUSE desktop. More details about the transition and a download link for the openSUSE Live CD with KDE Plasma 5 are in Luca Beltrame's blog post.
