Kubuntu 15.04 Is Turning Out Quite Nice: A Good Way To Try Out The Latest KDE Experience

With the Kubuntu 15.04 release due out in April it's using the Plasma 5 desktop by default. This morning I tried out the latest daily ISO snapshot of Kubuntu 15.04 to see how this bleeding-edge KDE Linux desktop experience is panning out. Simply put, Kubuntu and the latest KDE experience is doing quite well.

Thanks to the work by Jonathan Riddell and others, Kubuntu remains a great way to try out the latest KDE experience. Currently in the Ubuntu Vivid archive as used by Kubuntu 15.04 is KDE Frameworks 5.7 and Plasma 5.2.1, the latest key upstream KDE components. The Qt5 packages for (K)Ubuntu 15.04 are based on Qt 5.4.

From using the Kubuntu 15.04 release for about an hour this morning, I was pleased with the experience. In having not tried out Plasma 5 in a few months, I was pleased with the feel of the desktop and it being very responsive, feeling polished, and on par with the KDE Plasma 4.x desktop.

KDE Plasma 5.3.0 is coming at the end of April, which is being released after the Kubuntu 15.04 release. However, there will almost surely be PPAs and other packages available of these newer forthcoming KDE5 packages.

As usual, under the hood of Kubuntu 15.04 are the same packages as found in the Ubuntu Vivid Vervet like Linux 3.18 (soon to be Linux 3.19), Mesa 10.5-rc1, X.Org Server 1.16.3 RC1, GCC 4.9.2, etc.

Not all KDE applications have migrated over to Qt5/KF5 yet, but by the time of Kubuntu 15.10 more packages should have hopefully made the leap.

The only issue I ran into with today's testing of Kubuntu 15.04 was when wanting to install it to carry out some possible benchmarks, etc, the Ubiquity installer crashed midway through the installation process.

If you wish to try out Kubuntu 15.04 in its current development form, the latest daily images remain available from cdimage.ubuntu.com.