The stable version of KDE Plasma 5.4 should land in August

Aug 9, 2015 19:56 GMT  ·  By

The KDE team is preparing to release the new Plasma 5.4 desktop, and it's going to bring some pretty interesting improvements, including an enhanced Breeze icon set.

One of the issues that any icon set has is the lack of support for all the apps out there. This is a well-known problem for all designers out there who want to cover as much as possible. KDE features the Breeze icon set by default and it's a big one, but you'll always find an app that doesn't fit in because Breeze designers haven't included an icon for it.

This problem becomes less apparent the more icons you have in your collection, but it also means that designers need to find out what are the most used apps out there and build icons for each and every one. As you can imagine, this is an incredibly difficult task. The upside is that, when you do have proper support in your icon set, a lot of users will notice it right away, and you won't have as many complaints about the lack of consistency.

Plasma 5.4 will be a very interesting release

Each new Plasma version in the 5.x branch has been more significant than the previous one, and it looks like the 5.4 won't disappoint in this regard. The developers have been working on this version since April, and we do know that they plan an August release.

"The VDG investigate a lot into a consistent user experience, and therefore we updated the Breeze icon set from 1.600 to 3.000 icons (plasma 5.3 to 5.4).Of course, the Breeze icon set isn’t finished but for the standard apps you will have Breeze all over the desktop. In addition to the standard KDE apps we also support some GTK apps like Firefox, Geany, LibreOffice, InkScape and a lot of GTK 2 icons are included too. For KDE we now support 16px and 22px toolbar icons," reads the announcement from the KDE Visual Design Group.

KDE Plasma 5.4 should land by the end of August, and it will bring more than just an icon update. Stay tuned for more information about this release.