Plasma Next Alpha

This week, as well as being a centrefold model in a tabloid rag, another of my life ambitions came true when I had the glory of being the release dude. Plasma 2014.6 is the first version of Plasma using KDE Frameworks 5 and the developers are hard at work coding on it. The release schedule required an Alpha so I was tasked with working out how to release some tars.

This is a very exciting release because it's the start of the next evolution of KDE Software. No major feature overhauls just a solid codebase to work from using nice technologies like QtQuick.

This is also a very boring release because it's made up of kde-workspace and kde-runtime both of which are about to disappear as the archive gets modularised. kde-runtime also overlaps with much of the kde-runtime from KDE SC 4 land so you can't install it alongside your normal KDE Software install. We'll fix that.

I also included a release of Oxygen Fonts which is the new feature font for Plasma. The developer of this has renamed it due to trademark issues to Comme Font but there's some alignment issues in Comme Font, plus it needs a copy of Font Forge from git to generate the .ttf files which nobody seems to be able to compile. Please tell me how if you can.

Packages are in the Kubuntu Experimental PPA for anyone who wants to try but we're still working out all the dependencies etc. And it'll remove your existing KDE install, so you take your chances :)

It's the start of something amazing...