Here are the new features of KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS

Oct 4, 2016 12:00 GMT  ·  By

Today, October 4, 2016, the KDE project was proud to unveil the newest and most advanced release of its popular, modern, and free desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.

KDE Plasma 5.8 has been in development for the past few months, it's a major release with numerous new features, and it comes as a drop-in replacement for the Plasma 5.7 series, which reached end of life on September 13, 2016 with the KDE Plasma 5.7.5 maintenance update. Best of all, KDE Plasma 5.8 is an LTS (Long Term Support) branch that will receive point releases until 2018.

Prominent features of KDE Plasma include support for desktop widgets, a new system-wide search functionality that promises to let users easily search their KDE desktops for everything they want, including apps, music, videos, files, folders, etc., a new tool to get hot new stuff for your KDE Plasma desktop, such as wallpapers, widgets, desktop effects, or window styles, and infinite customization possibilities.

KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS comes with a unified boot to the shutdown artwork, Right-to-Left (RTL) language support, simplified global shortcuts, improvements to many applets, bugfixes in multi-screen support, better support for docking stations and projectors, KWin window manager enhancements, new default fonts, Kirigami goodness, and much better Wayland support.

"Today KDE releases its first Long Term Support edition of its flagship desktop software, Plasma," reads the announcement. "This marks the point where the developers and designers are happy to recommend Plasma for the widest possible audience be they enterprise or non-techy home users. If you tried a KDE desktop previously and have moved away, now is the time to re-assess, Plasma is simple by default, powerful when needed."

Supported until April 2018

As mentioned before, KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS will be supported until the year 2018, and it shall receive no less than nine point releases. The first one, KDE Plasma 5.8.1, will come next week, on October 11, followed one week later by the second one, KDE Plasma 5.8.2. On November 1, KDE Plasma 5.8.3 will arrive with more improvements, and KDE Plasma 5.8.4 should see the light of day three weeks later, on November 22, 2016.

The last maintenance update that will be released in 2016 for KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS is KDE Plasma 5.8.5, which should land on the third Christmas day, December 27. After that, there will be KDE Plasma 5.8.6 on February 21, KDE Plasma 5.8.7 on May 23, KDE Plasma 5.8.8 on October 17, and, the last one, KDE Plasma 5.8.9, on April 10, 2018. Until then, KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS will soon hit the stable repos of various GNU/Linux distributions. KDE will celebrate 20 years of activity on October 14, 2016.

KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS with desktop widgets
KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS with desktop widgets

KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS (4 Images)

KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS released
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