Plasma 5.8 LTS now in KDE neon, Time to Look Again at Comprehensive Features; Gwenview Plugins Install

Plasma 5.8 LTS has been released, it’s time now to look again at Plasma’s comprehensive features.  Chris From the Linux Action Show voiced our Plasma 5.8 video so you can review the comprehensive features we’ve been polishing for the last couple of years and the shiny new ones in this release to make a desktop we’re proud to advocate to enthusiasts, home users, businesses and developers alike.


The KDE neon builders have been firing away this afternoon and Plasma 5.8 LTS is now available in the User Edition archive.  If you don’t already have KDE neon installed you can grab the latest User Edition ISO to install it on your hard disk.


A feature I’ve been wanting for ages in KDE is the ability to install plugins from within the application.  This was made more urgent when we added Gwenview in KDE neon and had to choose between either an empty Plugins menu or adding a dependency on Kipi Plugins which brought in Konqueror and several KDElibs 4 tools.

So I got round to coding the feature based on discussions I’d had previously and work on the Samba browser in Dolphin I’d done before.  Using Packagekit and Appstream libraries directly to find the package and install it.  But some reviewers convinced me to use an external app to care about the install.  So now all Gwenview does it launch the Appstream URL and wait until a plugin gets installed.  In Plasma’s case that means Discover starts up and uses Packagekit or whatever backend it’s set up with to install Kipi Plugins.  A nice bit of integration there. Future work would be to put this functionality in Kipi Plugins directly so all apps can use it without much effort.  Where else can KDE apps benefit from being able to install addons within the app?

Gwenview’s Kipi plugins installer now in master

 

31 Replies to “Plasma 5.8 LTS now in KDE neon, Time to Look Again at Comprehensive Features; Gwenview Plugins Install”

  1. Thank you for a BEAUTIFUL release. I love the artwork. Boot selector, boot splash, login screen, login splash, log out screen. They are all a huge improvement 🙂

  2. I love how plasma discover looks now and also the plugin bit in Gwenview. I wondered what would happen to Gwenview, my favourite photo managing app. And now you updated it.
    This a beast of a release. Many Thanks!!!!!!

  3. Been playing around with Neon user edition 20160705 0929 (KDE Plasma 5.7) for a few months now. Very impressive. Can’t wait to take this new release out for a spin. Thanks in advance for all the hard work I know it must take.

  4. I have NEON with 5.8 installed. I cannot get SAMBA Workgroups to show in Dolphin or in smb4k. I use an smb.conf file that works in other distros. I have kdenetwork-filesharing installed and smbd and nmbd are enabled and started. testparm doesn’t show any issues. Help?

    1. How to get Dolphin’s SaMBa-Client Working:

      If you are using a simple workgroup without domains at home, then – to connect to your other remote shares – you may have to add: ‘client use spnego = no’ within the ‘[global]’ section of your ‘/etc/samba/smb.conf’. I had to do this to connect to my ‘AVM FritzBox’ modem’s/router’s SMB share. And I had to do this to connect to an ‘Apple Time Capsule’s’ SMB share, too.

      You can test this from outside the KDE desktop software by using samba’s ‘smbclient’ shell client.

      I hope, this helps.

  5. Great work !! Thanks a lot !!
    Will there be the possibility for “average users” 😉 to remain at LTS versions of KDE on Neon ? AFAIK there is no “LTS” distro in sync with “LTS” KDE, which reduces the audience quite a bit 🙂
    Thanks again !

      1. Are there any news on this ?
        Where could we find some info ?

  6. I can’t seem to find the option for using video wallpapers on the lockscreen.

  7. When I go to the link, got this error:

    Forbidden

    You don’t have permission to access /neon/images/neon-useredition/current/ on this server.

    Apache/2.2.22 (Debian) Server at files.kde.org Port 80

    Some help?

    1. we’re currently rebuilding the full archive and ISOs. Should be back up soon. Sorry for the inconvenience

  8. to all the KDE Neon team: THANK YOU!

    this is my favorite distro ever.. ahem.. KDE project 😛 soo smoooth!

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/cantata-qt 😉

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