KDE : The path ahead
There used to be a time when KDE was the undisputed leader among Desktop Environments for Linux. That has changed the past few years, with GNOME gaining a commanding lead, but of course KDE folk are not resting on their laurels and they plan full steam ahead with KDE 5.
Jos Poortvliet posted two articles over dot.kde.org describing the current state of affairs and where the project is headed; it’s a very good read if you are interested in that sort of stuff. Here’s an interesting part:
Plasma 5
Plasma took some time to mature, in part due to its ambitious design, in part because the technologies it built upon were not mature enough for the needs of Plasma. This is still somewhat of a problem today, and the 4.x series has workarounds to deal with the deficiencies in the platforms below it.
This is where the next generation of Plasma technology comes in. Conveniently named Plasma 5, it will bring pixel-perfect design and super smooth performance thanks to the QML and Qt 5 technologies and fully hardware accelerated display rendering. High DPI support and the ability to work with Wayland (Linux’s next generation display server) are planned as well, but neither are expected to be fully finished with the first release.
With Plasma 5 the team can start working on bringing seamless switching of work-spaces when moving from device to device. For example, plugging a keyboard and mouse into a tablet can trigger Plasma to transform its tablet-and-touch optimized UI into the desktop interface. And the applications, being notified of the change, can follow adapting to the new form factor. The current Plasma technology already can hint to applications which QML/ Javascript/ graphics files fit the current form factor and is already being used in Plasma Active, the tablet-optimized workspace of Plasma. None of this requires logging out-and-in – you can just continue working with the document you were working in or keep reading that web site!
