Last week I went in Barcelona to the Plasma sprint with a bunch of old friends.
As usual it was a great experience, but let’s talk about results 🙂
The framework architecture is being finalized, compared to Plasma1 it will be way simpler. the Plasma framework will be a nice lean library (an order of magnitude smaller than Plasma1) accompained by a runtime component: a series of plugins provided as QML2 imports and the runtime environment, the Plasma shell, that will run Plasma Desktop, Plasma Active and Plasma Netbook (and any other you can imagine and write 😉 and even switch the shell at runtime. This is possible because the shell binary is pure logic, it doesn’t have any UI whatsoever.
The coding I did during the sprint was mostly on this area, especially a refactoring on how QML plasmoid are loaded by the shell and written, that should lead to faster startup and cleaner code.. but since is all stuff under the hood, no fancy screenshot tis time, sorry :p

The default Desktop experiece will be at first not too dissimilar to the one of Plasma1, a big focus will be on redesigning the singular components around simplicity and elegance (see here) rather than big changes in functionality altogether.
A set of visual guidelines is being developed, that will help any developer to make their plasmoid elegant and well integrated.
Changes can always come a bit at a time once the new technology is well road tested.