Tumbleweed and Netrunner Get Upgraded with Plasma 5.3
Over the weekend Jos Poortvliet announced that openSUSE Tumbleweed received "massive amount of changes" bringing Plasma 5.3 as the default desktop. Newly released Netrunner 16 also brought Plasma 5.3 as well as an interesting codename. Clement Lefebvre announced Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 upgrade path and said Cinnamon 2.6 and MATE 1.10 packages were right around the corner.
Tumbleweed now features Plasma 5.3 and KDE Applications 15.04.1. openSUSE's Jos Poortvliet blogged Saturday that Plasma 5 is now the default desktop of Tumbleweed because it is considered "stable for day-to-day usage and a considerable step up from the Plasma 4.x series." Poortvliet said these upgrades bring better performance and improved stability to Tumbleweed users and the "well-designed workspace" features "offers a more modern and optimized experience." Poortvliet also told users that the accelerated development cycle of KDE will help Tumbleweed users get "the latest and greatest" KDE apps and desktop.
Neil Rickert had been looking forward to Plasma 5.3 on Tumbleweed for a while and was very quick to jump on the new upgrades. Rickert did a fresh install and commented that it went smoothly from his USB memory stick except for Bug 930341 that requires manual intervention to facilitate booting. Rickert noticed the login now uses sddm that wouldn't start GNOME, so he switched back to lightdm. He also encountered the bug in restoring Konsole sessions that cause it to crash but said a fix was in the works. In fact, he noted that restoring sessions in general is acting a bit buggy in Plasma 5.3. The openSUSE menus are "the worst defect in Plasma 5," according to Rickert who said, "The subfolders are not there. If I select 'system,' then I get a screen dump showing more application names than I care to read through." Despite all the niggles, Rickert said that Plasma 5 "is reasonably congenial."
Speaking of Plasma 5.3, newly released Netrunner 16, codenamed Ozymandias, also features it as the default desktop. The release announcement said, "Plasma 5.3 is still not perfect, but has made a big step forward to add missing features from KDE4 and generally improve quality and stability for the KDE Desktop." It ships with, among others, Plasmazilla (Plasma-enabled Firefox and Thunderbird), Skype, Pidgin, Transmission-Qt, Marble, Audacious, VLC, KDEnlive, and Steam. This release also features Linux 3.19.0, LibreOffice 4.4, GIMP 2.8.10, and Firefox 37.0.
Linux Mint's Clement Lefebvre yesterday announced the upgrade path from Linux Mint Debian Edition 1 to 2. Users have been waiting over a month to test the new Jessie-based Betsy. The same day Lefebvre also said that Cinnamon 2.6 and MATE 1.10 are "just around the corner." Cinnamon 2.6 has reached feature-freeze and will probably be available by the end of the month. MATE 1.10 is nearly ready upstream and packages are already being compiled for Mint.
Other interesting bits for Linux today include:
* DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 610
* 5 of the most popular Linux gaming distros
* How to get started with Linux: A beginner's guide
* Stripped to the core and full of Xfce: Xubuntu Linux loses it