The devs have corrected numerous problems

Nov 12, 2014 12:41 GMT  ·  By

The KDE Community has announced that Plasma 5.1.1 has been released and it should be considered a maintenance update. The latest version in this series was made available only a month ago and the developers are moving very fast.

Now that the KDE project has been split into KDE Applications and Platform, KDE Frameworks, and KDE Plasma, the updates seem to be arriving at a faster pace. Developers are no longer waiting on others to update their packages, so that the entire KDE project can be released at once. Unfortunately, this will create some minor problems due to different version numbers and some users might be confused, but it will get sorted out eventually.

Plasma 5.1.1 may be just a maintenance update, but it looks like a much bigger one. It covers many issues from the desktop and there is something for everyone. There still are some problems to be corrected, but this is pretty much a done deal and it's stable.

The new Plasma desktop gets numerous fixes

The new KDE Plasma 5.x has been declared stable and it's been so for quite some time, but developers don't really want to add it just yet to their distributions by default. It's still considered pretty young, not to mention the fact that it comes with a new design that might not please everyone. Some users even went as a far as calling it Windows-like, although it has nothing to do with that system in terms of design.

"Today KDE releases a bugfix update to Plasma 5, versioned 5.1.1. Plasma 5 was released in July with many feature refinements and streamlining the existing codebase of KDE's popular desktop for developers to work on for the years to come. This release adds a month's worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors."

"You can install Plasma 5 directly from source. KDE's community wiki has instructions to compile it. Note that Plasma 5 does not co-install with Plasma 4, you will need to uninstall older versions or install into a separate prefix," write the developers.

The new KDE Plasma update will take a while to land in repositories, but Arch Linux and Kubuntu (the Plasma 5 edition) should be among the first to get the new desktop. You can also download the latest KDE Plasma 5.1.1 source packages from Softpedia or you can try Kubuntu 14.10 with Plasma 5 as a Live CD, if you want to see what the fuss is all about.

KDE Plasma 5 (7 Images)

Kubuntu with Plasma 5 desktop
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