Plasma/5.1 Changes

Artwork and Visuals

• Icons (added tons of icons to the Breeze theme)
• Refined plus Systray icons to match the general theme
• Native Breeze widget themes for Qt4 and Qt5
• New Look & feel / Megathemes system settings module
• Plasmoid alternatives switcher
• New clipboard Plasmoid
• System load viewer Plasmoid
• Icon theme for dark color schemes
• Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) restructuring to improve usability
• Visual glitch fixes

Workspace Elements

• plasma windowed, a method to run Plasmoids as applications, useful for example for Plasma Media Center
• Notifications and running job display has been polished
• Logout and Lock screens now supports keyboard navigation
• kdeplasma-addons returns with many add-ons coming back

Newly Available Widgets

The following add-ons have been ported from and are in Plasma 5.1 compared to 5.0:

• Sticky notes
• Fuzzy clock,
• Timer,
• System load viewer,
• Icon-only tasks ("Icontasks")
• Two new animated wallpapers: Hunyango, Haenau
• Unit conversion search plugin
• Konsole profiles search plugin

Digital Clock and Calendar

• Time zone support in Digital Clock
• Calendar renders much faster and more memory-efficient
• Date display in the clock

Folder

• Significantly improved performance and memory usage in desktop mode.
• Faster, more responsive drag-and-drop operations.
• Greatly expanded context menus.
• Support for the 'associated application' system is back.
• Keyboard navigation improvements (support for Home and End keys, etc.).
• Spatial keyboard navigation (arrow keys, etc.) for unsorted views.
• Tooltips can be disabled.
• Icon size can be changed.
• Better guard against corrupt configuration.
• Many bug fixes (a few bigger ones: graphical glitches with drag and drop on some

drivers addressed, sort by size was broken, anchored range selections on unsorted views misbehaved, drag-onto-to-launch for view-internal drag and drop crashed didn't work, ...).

• Bug due to which the view context menu now works when Folder is a panel popup fixed.

Kickoff Application Menu

• Support for screen readers and other accessibility (a11y) software.
• Layout fixes
• Performance improvements in favorites model
• Application descriptions are shown by default
• Various other visual and smaller interaction bugs fixed

Kicker Application Menu

• Basic support for editing menu entries right from the context menu (name, icon, command, etc.).
• Per-instance hiding of menu items.
• Basic integration with Muon Discover / package managers via PackageKit-Qt (you can jump into them via the context menu).
• Support for screen readers and other a11y software.
• Various bug fixes (a few bigger ones: improved positioning, "Add to Panel" with multiple applet instances in different panels could pick the wrong panel, initial keyboard focus when invoked via shortcut wasn't on the search field, ...).

Task Managers

• Icons-only Task Manager ("Icontasks") is back.
• Improved lifecycle behavior for launchers and startup notifications (clean handoffs/replacing, less visually messy co-existence).
• More reliable identity mapping between startup notifications and launchers and windows.

Baloo Search

• A user-visible query language which can be accessed via the kioslave. Example - `baloosearch://?query=tag:Fire`. The query language can handle quite complex expressions. This will create a "magic folder" which will be updated in realtime
• Better UTF-8 handling in Searching - We now take diacritic marks into account. See this blog post
• Removable Media Storage - We now never index Network File Systems by default (it can be enabled by the user, though).
• Better detection of frequently modified files. We delay indexing for them.
• Detecting xattr changes - Baloo is now more of a file indexer and will listen to changes on xattr for files. This means any application can set the tags/ratings by just setting the xattr of the file. Applications no longer need to talk to Baloo.
• Overall speed improvements
• Many more tests in the File Indexers

KWin Compositor and Window Manager

General

• use of libepoxy
• use of atlas texture for window decorations in OpenGL compositor
• support for EGL_EXT_platform_x11 and EGL_EXT_platform_wayland
• support for GLX_INTEL_swap_event in glxbackend

Wayland Support

• new binary kwin_wayland
• kwin_wayland supports starting the X-Server it needs to connect to
• Wayland (client) connection is held in a thread
• Support for using fullscreen shell interface
• Wayland related code split out into a new kwayland lib