[manjaro-general] Plasma 5.5 Live Media released

Fri Dec 11 01:00:00 CET 2015

![][1]

I’m happy to announce our Plasma 5.5 development build of Manjaro 15.12 (Capella)!

The KDE development team has been working hard over the last four months to smooth off the rough edges, add useful new workflows, make Plasma even more beautiful and build the foundations for the future.

The Breeze Plasma widget theme has been updated to make it more consistent. The Plasma Widget explorer now supports a two column view with new widget icons for Breeze, Breeze Dark and Oxygen. 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.

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.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.

In response to feedback there is now a rewritten support for legacy applications not using the StatusNotifier standard for system tray icons. 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.

Our default font has switched to Noto a beautiful and free font which aims to support all languages with a harmonious look and feel. 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.

## Noteable Calamares changes are

  * we reworked our preview of all installation options
  * some UEFI issues got fixed
  * it is now possible to use the same password also for the root account
  * bootloaders can now be optionally installed (BIOS mode)

## Noteable changes in our tools

  * kcm module of Manjaro-Settings got reworked
  * several enhancements to Pamac and Octopi
  * optimizations and fixes to Manjaro-Tools
  * a lvm issue was fixed within Thus

## Notable changes in our packages

We managed to adopt the new C++11 ABI Switch. Therefor a large amount of our packages got rebuilt. If you still find some issues in this regard, please don’t hesitate to inform us about it.

Archlinux upstream fixes are now from: Fri Dec 11 09:31:23 CET 2015.

It is always good to check for updated packages, even we don’t notify you about them. As usual people using our testing branch will help us to get snaps over to our stable branch almost smoothly. For notifications on daily bases please take a look at our [mailing list][2].

Kind regards, Philip Müller and the Manjaro Development Team

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## Current supported kernels

  * Linux310 3.10.94
  * Linux312 3.12.51
  * Linux313 3.13.11.31
  * Linux314 3.14.58
  * Linux316 3.16.7.20
  * Linux318 3.18.24
  * Linux319 3.19.8.11
  * Linux41 4.1.14
  * Linux42 4.2.7
  * Linux43 4.3.2
  * Linux44 4.4-rc4

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## Links

  * [Talk about this update][3]
  * [Download][4]

   [1]: https://manjaro.github.io/images/manjaro-kde-15.12-dev.jpg
   [2]: https://lists.manjaro.org/pipermail/manjaro-packages
   [3]: https://forum.manjaro.org/index.php?topic=29006.0
   [4]: https://sourceforge.net/projects/manjarotest/files/15.12/kde-minimal/15.12-dev/

URL: https://manjaro.github.io/Plasma5.5-livecd-released/