KDE is an international technology team that creates free and open source software for desktop and portable computing. Among KDE's products are a modern desktop system for Linux and UNIX platforms, comprehensive office productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of software titles in many categories including Internet and web applications, multimedia, entertainment, educational, graphics and software development. KDE software is translated into more than 60 languages and is built with ease of use and modern accessibility principles in mind. KDE's full-featured applications run natively on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X.
Noticeable Changes:
- Supercharged Task Manager: Multitasking has just become easier. The much improved task manager in Plasma 5.6 now displays progress of tasks, such as downloading or copying files.
- Smoother Widgets: There are many refinements to the overall visuals of Plasma in this release.
- Weather: Another feature returns from the old days, the weather widget.
- On the road to Wayland: Window decorations are now supported for Wayland clients giving you a beautiful and unified user experience.
- Make sure kcrash is initialized for discover.
- Build Breeze Plymouth and Breeze Grub tars from correct branch.
- KWin: Fix crash on repainting an invalid sizes decoration. The first ever KWin bug fix which is combined with an X11 integration test.
- Fix hover effect on desktop in pager.
- Fix drawing QtQuickControls ComboBox popups.
- Fix untranslatable string in Activities KCM.
- Show ratings in Discover Packagekit backend.
You can checkout announcement list here for latest KDE plasma release.
To upgrade to latest KDE Plasma 5 desktop in Kubuntu 16.04 Xenial open Terminal and copy the following commands in the Terminal:
Note: You can also install KDE Plasma 5 in Ubuntu 15.10 Wily using the following PPA but it won't be latest version for 15.10
To install latest KDE Plasma 5 desktop in Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial open Terminal (Press Ctrl+Alt+T) and copy the following commands in the Terminal: