What's new in Plasma 5.12 LTS?

[Jonathan Riddell]

It's an LTS so it focused on Speed and Stability over new features.
The video has a pretty graph saying it's 30% faster in boot up time.
It also has much lower memory requirements than the competition.  The
announcement lists a number of new features since 5.8 LTS.  And being
Plasma it has a familiar default setup which is simple by default but
powerful when required.

Jonathan


On 22 February 2018 at 10:58, Ludwig Nussel <ludwig.nussel at suse.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As you might know, openSUSE Leap uses KDE as default desktop and I
> intend to keep it that way. The LTS releases are crucial for that so
> I really appreciate having them. Leap 42, starting from .2 contained
> Plasma 5.8 LTS. Now the successor Leap 15 which is the new major
> version currently in beta phase will include Plasma 5.12 LTS.
>
> I wanted to ask the openSUSE marketing team to write some featured
> article about 5.12 and Leap 15 to promote both, especially since we
> now also have Leap 15 Live images¹ to make testing easy (to be
> announced soon).
>
> Leap, having SUSE Linux Enterprise as base is slow moving and has a
> primarily conservative user base. Means more professional users that
> may make a living out of it. They only update when they need to, or
> see value that outweigh the costs.
> So we need some convincing arguments as to why Leap 15 is worth the
> hassle of upgrading. Plasma 5.12 as the default has a flagship role
> there as it's one of the most visible aspects.
> We also have hardware vendors that preload Leap on their Laptops.
> I'd love to have some arguments as to why Leap 15 is worth investing
> in adjusting the preload images rather than continuing with the 42
> ones. And in KDE's interest we need some arguments why they should
> preload with KDE rather than GNOME.
>
> Looking at the Plasma 5.12 upstream announcement² I see speed
> improvements mentioned. That is of course always a good argument but
> then everyone plays that card as the opposite would be hardly
> positive :-) Also, wayland support. Ok, maybe interesting for Geeks.
> But then the feature list has e.g
>
> * The weather applet can now show the temperature next to the weather status
> icon on the panel
> * Clock widget's text is now sized more appropriately
> * Windows shadows are horizontally centered and larger by default
>
> I hope we all agree that this is nothing to write home about.
>
> So seriously, what's really in Plasma 5.12 that makes everyone want
> to go through the hassle of upgrading or try out KDE in the first
> place?
> Maybe some cool things are not even new but still worth mentioning
> as they (still) stand out from the competition?
>
> cu
> Ludwig
>
> [1] http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/leap/15.0/live/
> [2] https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.12.0.php
>
> --
>  (o_   Ludwig Nussel
>  //\
>  V_/_  http://www.suse.com/
> SUSE Linux GmbH, GF: Felix Imendörffer, Jane Smithard,
> Graham Norton, HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg)