KDE 5 is coming

[cobito]

After almost 6 years of life, KDE 4 will stop receiving major updates (updates that offer new features) and version 4.11, which is scheduled to be released on August 11, will be the last. After that, there will be 2 years of basic maintenance to fix bugs since the development team will focus on KDE 5 with Plasma 2.

Here you have a video of what a preliminary and very green version of Plasma 2 is capable of at the moment

[YOUTUBE-HD]mtKwjNdZFt4[/YOUTUBE-HD]

So KDE users are going to find themselves a good season without new features in our desktop environment and, although everyone says that the change will not be as dramatic as from KDE 3 to 4, it will probably end up producing an inevitable trauma when changing environments and not finding everything in its place, with a lack of features, silly bugs that were not there before, etc.

Source: [Phoronix] KDE 4.11 Will Be The Last Major KDE4 Workspaces Feature Release

[cobito]

As the KDE release date (in June) approaches, images of the new generation of the heaviest desktop environment for Linux are starting to appear.

This is the desktop clock:

The folder view (looks like it's Dolphin):

And the icons in the notification area

They have been published on the KDE design group blog.

Personally, I think it looks amazing. I just hope it doesn't come with as many bugs and lack of functionality as KDE 4 did, but they say KDE 5 will be just a facelift and not as radical a change as KDE 4 was.

Via

[cobito]

Today the first beta has been released.

This preview version includes what developers have called Frameworks 5 Porting Aids, which are a series of Frameworks that will facilitate the migration from KDE 4 to the new version

In this official wiki entry it explains how to install the packages on the main distributions.