“Gripes aside, it’s hard to overstate just how slick Plasma 5 is.”
within the System Settings applet, some options are deeply interred behind three tiers of categorisation. Fortunately most of these follow a reasonable heirarchy, so you’ll be spared the labyrinthine wanders of the ol’ days.
The power of the trinity
By demarcating strict boundaries between desktop, libraries and applications the KDE team has introduced a new way of looking at where the desktop ends and other components begin. Among the KDE Frameworks 5 collection, we find Baloo (a new stack for searching, indexing and gathering metadata), Solid (a hardware integration and discovery framework) and KDED (a daemon for providing system-level services). Plasma 5 consists of the Kwin window manager, the Breeze theme, the system settings application, application launchers and the like. KDE Applications include the Dolphin file manager, the Kontact PIM suite and Kstars, the celestial mapping program. The separation of the trinity also allows each project to develop more or less independently, so KDE Frameworks have opted for a faster-paced monthly cycle, whereas Applications and Plasma have opted for a more conservative 3-month cycle.
Allowing these groups to develop at their own pace has had the slightly quirky sideeffect that, while Plasma will have reached version 5.5 by the time you read this, and Frameworks version 5.17, a number of core applications are still in the process of being ported to Qt5/ Kframeworks 5. Be that as it may, you can still try out Plasma (sans shiny Qt5 versions of Konqueror and Okular) without touching your current install by using an appropriate live CD. For example, Fedora 23, Ubuntu 15.10 (both on the LXFDVD) and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed all ship a Plasma 5 flavour. Alternatively, so long as you don’t have KDE 4 installed then most distributions (distros) allow you to add some repositories (repos) to get the goodness. Of course, distros closer to the cutting edge, such as Arch and Fedora, include Plasma 5 as standard, and pre-release versions of Kf5-powered applications can be got from the AUR or copr repos, though they should not be considered stable. You can check the porting status of the whole Applications family at http://developer. kde.org/~cfeck/portingstatus.html. and Applications 15.12 is scheduled for release in mid-December 2015, though some of its constituents will still depend on the old kdelibs stack. Frameworks 5 purists will want to cherry pick their applications accordingly. The venerable, identity-challenged (is it a file manager? Is it a web browser?) Konqueror still relies on the older libraries, but the newer Dolphin file manager doesn’t.
It’s interesting to note that the KDM display manager has been nixed. Perhaps a desktop doesn’t include the gateway by which it must be entered, or maybe the team just have plenty of other things to worry about. At any rate, there’s plenty of alternative display managers, the one KDE recommends is SimpleDesktop DisplayManager (SDDM), which uses the Qt5