Users can test the new Plasma desktop with a Live distro based on Kubuntu

Jun 13, 2014 09:24 GMT  ·  By

The KDE developers have been working very hard to have the new Plasma 5 desktop ready in time for the July launch, and it seems that most of the problems have been taken care of.

KDE will soon sport a new look for the Plasma desktop, which has been improved in a number of ways. The first thing a regular user will see is that the new Plasma is now much cleaner, better defined, and more modern.

One point of contention with KDE was that the desktop had remained pretty much the same in the last couple of years, but that is about to change after the new Plasma becomes available for download and upgrade.

KDE Frameworks 5 is preparing for the stable release and Plasma 5 will be an integral part of that. Users will have to wait just a couple of months until they can enjoy the stable version.

“On our Plasma 5 build status page most of the packages are now a pleasing green colour. For the first time today I installed them all and logged in and... it worked! It took a bit of removing old caches and obsolete installs that'd I'd been making in the months previously and that nice temporary Next wallpaper everyone uses doesn't really get shipped so I had to add that and the icons sometimes work and sometimes don't and there's no plasma-nm release yet so I had to grab a copy and build that before I could use the network. But with some fiddle and wee bit ay faff, it works!” said Jonathan Riddell, KDE and Kubuntu developer.

When the developer was talking about Plasma being green, he didn't actually refer to the color. The development process is going smoothly and most of the problems have been corrected, hence the green reference.

Previous versions of Plasma and KDE were harder to test, but the developers are now providing an ISO of a distribution based on Kubuntu 14.04 that has the latest packages integrated. This is only a Live image and it can't be installed, but at least users can play with it and they can see what new features have been added.

Some users have also expressed their disappointment with the way Plasma 5 looks and they have said that it's too close to Windows. If you give it a chance, you will see that that’s definitely not the case and, in fact, it's quite distinct from everything else.