We saw last week the release of the first beta of KDE Plasma Workspace and applications 4.11

From my side, that’s a very important milestone, because it’s pretty much the coronation of what we intended the 4.x series of the workspace to be. It was a long ride, but I think this future release will be pretty stable and “defined” in its own identity.

The 4.11 release of the Workspace will be supported for years to come, marking in fact the last big feature release of the 4.x series.

This sounds pretty scary, but it indicates a lot of maturity, 4.11 will be a release you can count on being maintained abd bugs fixed for a long time. Nice for home users, utterly awesome for bigger deployments.

Just to clarify: this regards only Plasma Workspace so far. Applications will continue feature releases as usual, after all KDE is not a software, is a community that releases a lot of eterogeneous pieces of software.

So, were are now?

• The desktop shell is useful by default. A default setup has all the typical functionality that a typical desktop usage needs, but.. one size does not fit all.
• The desktop shell is very flexible, trying to not force a paradigm on you, assemmble it at your liking.
• We have at least 5 different shells: Desktop, Netbook, Plamsa Active, Media center, part for application dashboards. Because one size does not fit all, on different devices we try to give you the best experience given the particular device.
• QML: It’s very easy to write new components for your desktop/tablet/mediacenter/whatever with an easy scripting language.

But of course we never are happy: we want to do new things and have new features in the future..

• We are porting to Qt5 and QML2
• The whole workspace will be rendered by the GPU: faster and will be possible to have beautiful effects.
• We will have one shell to rule them all: the actual Plasma Shell becomes just a generic “viewer” with no UI whatsoever by itself. Since all the UI elements will be done by QML, they can be loaded and unloaded, so a different device experience can be dynamically loaded when for instance you plug your tablet to a docking station, the full Desktop shell starts.
• Even tough it will mean a quite big technology change, since we are quite happy with the overall direction of each one of our shells, there won’t be radical UI changes, except of course the usual incremental upgrades and refinements.

I’ll do a talk about Plasma2 at Akademy, going a bit more in deep about the technology, the big picture concept and how to get involved in, so see you there 🙂