What's new in Plasma 5.12 LTS?

[ddemaio]

Thank you Jonathan, Nate and Marco.

I'll use some of your points plus some other stuff Antonio sent me. I 
had the announcement info already, but the emails you all sent fills in 
some extra info I was looking for. Thank you for all the development 
y'all do.

v/r

Doug


On 02/22/2018 12:10 PM, Jonathan Riddell wrote:
> 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)