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. ↫ Kai Uwe It took them a few years after the release of Plasma 5.0, but eventually they won me over, and I’m now solid in the KDE camp, after well over a decade of either GNOME or Cinnamon. GNOME has strayed far too much away from just being a traditional desktop user interface, and Cinnamon is dragging its heels with Wayland support, but luckily KDE has spent a long time now clearing up so many of the paper cuts that used to plague them every time I tried KDE. That’s all in the past now. They’ve done a solid job cleaning up a lot of the oddities and inconsistencies during Plasma 5’s lifecycle, and I can’t wait until Fedora 40 hits the streets with Plasma 6 in tow. In the desktop Linux world, I feel KDE and Qt will always play a little bit of second fiddle to the (seemingly) much more popular GNOME and GTK+, but that’s okay – this kind of diversity and friendly competition is what makes each of these desktops better for their respective users. And this is the Linux world, after all – you’re not tied down to anything your current desktop environment does, and you’re free to switch to whatever else at a moment’s notice if some new update doesn’t sit well with you. I can’t imagine using something like macOS or Windows where you have to just accept whatever garbage they throw at you with nowhere to go.