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KDE  Plasma 5.5 Beta Release
Updated Breeze Plasma Theme

The Breeze Plasma widget theme has been updated to make it more consistent.While the Breeze icons theme adds new icons and updates the existing icon set to improve the visual design.
Plasma Widget Explorer
The Plasma Widget explorer now supports a two column view with new widget icons for Breeze, Breeze Dark and Oxygen.                                  


Expanded Feature Set in Application Launcher

Context menus in Application Launcher (‘Kickoff’) can now list documents recently opened in an application, allow editing the application’s menu entry and adding the application to the panel, Task Manager or desktop. Favorites now supports documents, directories and system actions or they can be created from search results. These features (and some others) were previously available only in the alternative Application Menu (‘Kicker’) and have now become available in the default Application Launcher by sharing the backend between both launchers.


New Applets in Plasma Addons
Color Picker
Not only have we restored support for the Color Picker applet, we’ve given it an entire new UI refresh to fit in with Plasma 5.
The color picker applet lets you pick a color from anywhs are available on GitHub are open source, non-commercial use. In an effort to make things easy for beginners the developer elvisimprsntr created a SiriProxy RPi SD card image with SiriProxy pre-installed.ere on the screen and automatically copies its color code to the clipboard in a variety of formats (RGB, Hex, Qt QML rgba, LaTeX).

User Switcher
User switching has been updated and improved and is now accessible from the Application Launcher, the new User Switcher applet and in the lock screen. It shows the user’s full name and user set avatar. This is very useful for offices with shared desks.
Disk Quota
Plasma 5.5 sees a new applet designed for business environments or universities. This applet will show you usage assessed not around the real disk usage, but your allowed quota by your system administrator.

Activity Pager
Done for users whose use case of activities partly overlaps with virtual desktops: it looks like a pager, it behaves like a pager but uses activities instead of virtual desktops. This gives a quick glimpse of what activities are running and how many windows are associated to each activity.

Restored Legacy Icons in System Tray Support
In response to feedback, we’ve rewritten support for legacy applications not using the StatusNotifier standard for system tray icons.

OpenGL ES Support in KWin
Support for switching to OpenGL ES in KWin returns. So far only switching through an environment variable and restarting KWin is supported. Set environment variable KWIN_COMPOSE to ‘O2ES’ to force the OpenGL ES backend. Please note that OpenGL ES is not supported by all drivers. Because of that it’s not exposed through a configuration mechanism. Please consider it as an expert mode.

Wayland Progress
With Plasma 5.5 a basic Wayland session is provided. Wayland is the successor of the dated X11 windowing system providing a modern approach. The system is more secure (e.g. key loggers are no longer trivial to implement) and follows the paradigm of ‘every frame perfect’ which makes screen tearing very difficult. With Plasma 5.4 the KDE community already provided a technology preview based on the feature set of the Phone project. With Plasma 5.5 this is now extended with more ‘desktop style’ usages. Important features like move/resize of windows is now supported as well as many integration features for the desktop shell. This allows for usage by early adopters, though we need to point out that it is not yet up to the task of fully replacing an X session. A new screen management protocol has been created for configuring the connected screens of a Wayland session.Also added are some protocols for controlling KWin effects in Wayland such as window background blur and windows minimize animation.

New Discover design
With the help of the KDE Visual Design Group we came up with a new design that will improve the usability of our software installer.
Info Center
A status module for the file indexer was added.
Plasma Network Manager
There have been several improvements to our network manager applet. WPA/WPA2 Enterprise validation was added, it uses a new password field widget and OpenVPN has more options.


Downloads
The easiest way to try it out is with a live image booted off a USB disk. You can find a list of Live Images with Plasma 5 on the KDE Community Wiki and for Package downloads refer Package download wiki page