On October 18, 2016, long time KDE software developer Sebastian Kügler published an in-depth story about what’s coming to the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment in the next couple of years.
It appears that KDE’s Plasma team had their traditional kickoff meeting on Monday, October 17, to discuss the upcoming features of the next KDE Plasma 5 release, which will be versioned 5.9, and whose release schedule has been already published, as reported earlier right here on this space.
However, the Plasma team also discussed new ways to improve the quality of the popular desktop environment, as well as to make it faster, more stable and reliable than existing versions. Their aim is to bring KDE Plasma to an unprecedented level of quality that will blow the competition away.
“Our general direction points towards professional use-cases. We want Plasma to be a solid tool, a reliable work-horse that gets out of the way, allowing to get the job done quickly and elegantly. We want it to be faster and of better quality than the competition,” said Sebastian Kügler in the blog announcement.
Here’s what’s coming to KDE Plasma 5 in 2017 and 2018
As for the new features, the KDE Plasma team plans to further improve the Breeze icon theme and create a Mozilla Firefox theme for it, bring back KDE Plasma 4’s beloved global menu feature, better support for customizing locales, and numerous new Wayland features, such as support for scaling the contents of each output individually.
There will be so many Wayland enhancements that you won’t be able to handle, including better virtual desktops and multi-screen rendering improvements. Other then that, the Plasma Mobile experience will see further stabilization and new features, and improvements to the integration of online services.
2017 will see four new KDE Plasma 5 releases, instead of three, namely KDE Plasma 5.9 on January 31, KDE Plasma 5.10 on May, KDE Plasma 5.11 in September, and KDE Plasma 5.12 in December. In 2018, we’ll see the KDE Plasma 5.13 release in April, and the next LTS, KDE Plasma 5.14, on August. Read our initial report for all the release dates.
