KDE Plasma 5.18 Released

jrepin writes: The KDE community today announced the release of Plasma 5.18. This version of the popular desktop environment is the latest long-term supported release and brings an emoji selector, user feedback capabilities, a global edit mode, and improvements to System Settings, the Discover software manager, widgets, GTK integration and much more. The full Plasma 5.18.0 changelog is available here.

I tried to play the video on the website

[saloomy]

Other than the strange music and the opening scene of the bug on the keyboard, I couldn't get the remainder of the video to load. Not the experience I was expecting. I sit on an AT&T fiber connection to so I don't think it was my internet connectivity.

Re:

[jrepin]

No problem with playback here. BTW there is also a copy available on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Re:

[samwichse]

What I got from the video:

It's easy to paste emojis in a terminal now. For some reason.

Well then...

[sydsavage]

Finally! An emoji selector!

Re:

[oogoliegoogolie]

Just what everyone has been hoping for and waiting patiently. At least it's hidden and is manually activated, instead of being automatically activated by some "smart" "Hey, it looks like you are writing something that needs an emoji!" algorithm.

I haven't really used KDE for many years, but I must say the screenshots of KDE 5.18 make it look like the UI has improved much from what I remember during KDE's late 4.x or very early 5.x days.

Re:

[samwichse]

KDE has been great since around the 5.8 LTS version came out in 2016.

It's a darned shame it was dropped from official support in RHEL/CentOS, because there's no telling how long 5.18 will take to show up in epel-playground.

Re:

[kalpol]

OpenSuse has it. Frankly I've been happier with OpenSuse than CentOS for a lot of things, not the least of which RHEL doesn't let you also run CentOS anywhere in the environment.

Re:

[kalpol]

eh I said that but now I am not sure it's true, it's just what someone told me about RHEL licensing.

Firmware updates

[Hadlock]

I believe this version of Plasma rolls in automated firmware updates to the system software selector. You need a fairly mainstream device like a Thinkpad or XPS 13/15 laptop from a major vendor, but automated firmware updates via push button GUI in Linux is pretty fantastic, 2020 what a time to be alive.

interesting choice of languages on the KDE page

[4wdloop]

English Catalonian, Basque, Portuguese, Russian and Ukrainian

English | Català | Euskara | Português | |

wallpapers

[aRTeeNLCH]

Can we finally have different wallpapers on different desktops once again? The hack that's now relatively common works fine except when using desktop effects like the cube, then it suddenly becomes apparent that there's only one wallpaper that gets quickly swapped when changing desktops.

The silly thing is, it all went to hell when they had to implement activities and gave the feature creep there preference over not losing features that have been established for ages on regular multiple desktops...

And no one has actually been able to explain why one needs activities and why multiple desktops cannot fulfill the same function. On a computer screen, please don't come with the workshop and kitchen analogy, where in both cases you have more than one place where you can work but they are for different kinds of activities. It's all on the same computer display, with the same capability of running programs. I don't chop up veggies in the same place I sand and spray paint bike parts for practical, physical reasons. On a PC, those aren't there.

Re:

[dimitropoulos]

Consider that if you have more than one screen/display then activities are a significant difference from having multiple desktops. Also, the ability to pause and restart an activity is helpful. I have anywhere between 2-5 activities with two displays and two desktops each activity, so for me, I would be swimming in desktops if I didn't have activities to keep things organized.

Looking forward to this release hitting F31

[hispeedzintarwebz]

Looking forward to this hitting Fedora. I don't know if it will come to F31 or if I'll have to wait until F32 (if so, I'd rather wait than add a separate repo, etc). A lot of the changes I'm reading about are minor, but welcome. Things like a more streamlined system settings application, etc.