For those interested in the progress of KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 2, I’ve recorded a demo video which shows a few aspects of the current state of development of the upcoming version of your favourite Desktop.
The demo video shows the new Plasma shell running, including a panel with the task manager. It shows a demo applet doing some OpenGL tricks. The Kwin window manager and compositor is running in its Qt5 / Frameworks 5 incarnation, and there’s konsole, which has also already been ported to Frameworks 5.
Of course, all the usual warnings apply: This is a very early state of development, many things are missing, unstable or do not perform well yet. There’s also a fair bit of user interface cleanup and streamlining to be expected.
We are just about to enter a state where the desktop becomes dogfoodable, so we can use it ourselves regularly and find and iron out all kinds of bugs. The good news is of course that this is the perfect time to get involved. While we’re not looking quite at the blank canvas that Plasma was when it came to be, right now we really are shaping the future of Plasma, you can take part in it and make it happen. We’ve compiled a list of tasks for Plasma 2 that need to be tackled. There’s of course also a lot of work still to be done for KDE Frameworks 5: many tasks, big and small are longing for attention. If there’s something interesting in there for you, or if you would like to see it happen more quickly, jump in! If you’re interested, in the release plans for all this new goodness, I recommend reading this article on KDE’s Dot. Rumours say that there’s an interesting follow-up article planned, so stay tuned!
If you want to give it a spin, you can build the whole thing from our git repositories, or use the Kubuntu Neon 5 packages to set up a test system.