This is one of the biggest updates made until now

Apr 28, 2015 12:19 GMT  ·  By

The KDE Community announced that Plasma 5.3, the desktop for the KDE project, has been finally released, and it marks an important milestone in the history of this desktop environment.

The KDE desktop environment has gone through some major changes in the past few months and its developers have managed to come up with a much more modern desktop than what we could use just a year ago. KDE has been the go-to desktop for people who wanted nice effects, animations, and so on. It was also one of the most hardware hungry solutions, but it's been a success nonetheless.

Plasma is the desktop of the KDE project, and just like all of the other components, it has undergone a serious facelift. In fact, the changes made to Plasma are so substantial that it looks like the project has jumped into the future half a decade.

KDE Plasma 5.3 is just "fabulous"

Most of the Linux users already know what the KDE desktop used to look like, but not too many have seen the latest Plasma developments and that's a shame. It has come a long way, and it's hard to find words that describe just how much it has evolved and just how good it now looks and feels.

The latest Plasma 5.3 update features much better power management. For example, KDE will no longer suspend when closing the lid while a shutdown procedure is in effect, support has been added for keyboard button brightness controls on lock screen, the battery monitor is now able to give precise details about apps, and power management settings can be configured differently for particular activities.

In addition, the developers have added Plasma Media Center, which still needs some work, although it's stable enough. "It is fully stable but misses a few features compared to version 1. You can log directly into a Plasma Media Center session if you want to use it on a media device such as a television or projector or you can run it from Plasma Desktop. It will scan for videos, music and pictures on your computer to let you browse and play them," reads the official announcement.

Other improvements include better Plasma widgets, improved Bluetooth capabilities, various desktop tweaks, Wayland support (just the fundamentals until now), and so many bugs fixes that it's hard to count them.

The new KDE Plasma update will take a while to land in repositories. You can also download the latest KDE Plasma 5.3.0 source packages from Softpedia.

Plasma 5.3 (9 Images)

Plasma 5.3
Plasma 5.3 with BluetoothPlasma 5.3 launcher
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