The Birth of Plasma 5

I'll keep things brief, since I'm inbetween KDevelop windows right now: It's out today, and in my mind it took just about nine months to make it. Nine months, now that's a timescale with some cachet.

Back in September, we had this, as best as memory serves:

• A rough initial ramp-up of the freshly-refactored low-level Plasma libraries on top of Qt 5 / Qt Quick 2.
• And on top of a similarly rough-and-in-motion Frameworks 5.
• A Plasma shell application that could render a basic wallpaper (with no config yet).
• A few "test this library API" widgets.
• Very broken and very empty panels.
• And we were still running this inside the old Plasma Desktop 4, since we didn't have kwin yet, or an actual session.

Since then, we:

• Rewrote about 80% of the core Plasma Desktop components from scratch, with significant improvements in some areas (e.g. the tray and notifications).
• Ported the rest over from 4.x, often with significant cleanup and non-trivial changes.
• Created hundreds of new visual assets from scratch.
• Ported many, many support and system integration bits, such as network management, while continuing to make significant improvements to them.
• Kept contributing fixes and features to Qt 5 in a major way.
• Continued porting and modularizing KDE's libraries, and finally shipped them as Frameworks 5.0.
• Not insignificantly, kept up supporting and releasing KDE 4 in parallel (with a major overhaul of the semantic desktop implementation in 4.13).

Kick-ass. It's been an amazingly productive time in the KDE community lately (not just in Plasma and Frameworks - KF5 porting of apps is going on as well!), and we'll be back in just three months with yet more.

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