Plasma 5: The Early Years
With KDE’s 6th Mega Release finally out the door, let’s reflect on the outgoing Plasma 5 that has served us well over the years. Can you believe it has been almost ten years since Plasma 5.0 was released? Join me on a trip down memory lane and let me tell you how it all began. This coincidentally continues pretty much where my previous retrospective blog post concluded.
We released Plasma 5.0 on Tuesday, 15th July 2014, one week after the first issue of the KDE Frameworks 5, and 11 months after last Plasma 4 feature release which was part of the KDE Software Compilation 4.11. It featured an all-new shell written in QML and Qt Quick with infrastructure to switch between different form factors at runtime – ever wondered why the file it stores your desktop config in is called plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc? It’s because your settings are stored per form factor.