14 DAY TRIAL // The openSUSE KDE Team meeting took place on the first day of April and Raymond Wooninck had the pleasure of informing us about the new features that will be implemented in the upcoming release of the openSUSE Tumbleweed computer operating system, a rolling-release version of openSUSE Linux.
Therefore, we can report today that OpenSuSE Tumbleweed will finally switch to the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment by default. The switch will happen at the end of April 2015. In addition, the soon-to-be-released KDE Application 15.04 packages will also be pushed to the Factory/Tumblweed channel.
All KDE4 packages will become obsolete in openSUSE Tumbleweed
As expected, the inclusion of the KDE Plasma 5, KDE Framework 5, and KDE Applications 15.04 will make all the KDE4 packages obsolete, which means that the KDE4 desktop environment will no longer be supported or maintained in the openSUSE Tumbleweed operating system after the switch.
The development team also announced a series of tweaks that will be implemented in the next openSUSE Tumbleweed version. As such, we can report that the default Start Menu of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment will be Kicker and that Breeze will be the default theme.
New software repositories will be added as well
Additionally, they will use the upstream KDE menu structure, and new software repositories will be added, including KDE:Frameworks for KDE Plasma 5 and KDE Frameworks 5, KDE:Applications for KDE Applications, as well as KDE:Extra for other KDE and Qt related packages from the community. An unstable variant will exist for each of the aforementioned repos.
Some other minor tweaks will also come to the next openSUSE Tumbleweed release, including openSUSE version of the Breeze iconset to match with the Breeze theme, various default browser settings, and replacement of the Update Applet (Apper/Muon) in favor of the YaST/zypper combination.