Linux: The Ultimate Guide

Plasma Workspaces
KWin performance was increased by optimizing effect rendering. Window 
resizing was improved as well. Another KWin is QML based Window 
switcher, initial Wayland support and AnimationEffect class.

---

KDE Plasma Desktop Environment 
◾
55
Applications
A new version of Dolphin shipped with KDE Applications 4.8. It has 
improved performance with better file animated transitions name display 
with other new and improved features.
KDE SC 4.9
KDE SC 4.9 was available on August 1, 2012. The release featured various 
improvements to the Dolphin file manager, including the reintroduction 
of in-line file renaming, back and forward mouse buttons, the advance of 
the places panel, and better usage of file metadata. More, there were sev-
eral improvements to KWin and Konsole. Activities were better integrated 
with the workspace—several updated applications, including Okular, 
Kopete, Kontact, and educational applications.
KDE SC 4.10
It was released on February 6, 2013. Many default Plasma widgets were 
rewritten in QML, and Nepomuk, Kontact, and Okular improved 
significantly.
KDE SC 4.11
KDE SC 4.11 was released on August 14, 2013. Kontact and Nepomuk 
received many optimizations. The first generation Plasma Workspaces 
entered maintenance-only development mode.
KDE SC 4.12
KDE SC 4.12 was launched on December 18, 2013. The Kontact received 
substantial improvements.
KDE SC 4.13
KDE SC 4.13 was launched on April 16, 2014. The Nepomuk semantic 
desktop search was replaced with KDE’s in-house Baloo. KDE SC 4.13 was 
released in 53 different translations.
KDE SC 4.14
KDE SC 4.14 was launched on August 20, 2014. The release primarily 
focused on stability, with numerous bugs fixed and a few new features 
added. It was the final KDE SC 4 release.

---

56
◾
Linux 
KDE PLASMA 5
It is the fifth and current generation of the visual workspace environment 
created by KDE, mainly for Linux systems. KDE Plasma version 5 is the 
successor of KDE Plasma 4 and was released on July 15, 2014.
It includes a new theme, known as “Breeze,” and increased convergence 
across different devices. The graphical interface was migrated to QML, 
which uses OpenGL for hardware acceleration, which resulted in better 
performance and reduced power consumption. Its Mobile is a Plasma 5 
variant for Linux-based smartphones.
Software Architecture
KDE Plasma version 5 is built using Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5. It 
improves support for HiDPI displays and a convertible graphical shell, 
adjusting. KDE 5.0 also includes a new default theme. Qt 5’s QtQuick 2 
uses a hardware-accelerated OpenGL scene graph to compose and render 
graphics on the screen, allowing the offloading of computationally expen-
sive graphics rendering tasks onto the GPU, freeing up resources on the 
system’s main CPU.
It uses the X Window System. It supports that Wayland was prepared 
in the compositor and planned for a later release. It was created initially 
available in the 5.4 release. Stable support for an introductory Wayland 
session was provided in the 5.5 release (December 2015).
Support for NVIDIA proprietary driver for Plasma on Wayland was 
added in the 5.16 release (June 2019).
Development
Since the KDE Software Compilation split into KDE Plasma, KDE 
Frameworks, and KDE applications, each subproject can develop at its 
own pace. KDE Plasma 5 is on its release schedule, with feature releases 
every four months and bugfix releases in the intervening months.