Fedora 22 KDE Delivers A Great Plasma 5 Experience

Another ~6 months down, another Fedora release. While Fedora 23 looks to be an interesting release over all -- with some initial changes coming to Anaconda, and some changes coming to the upgrade process -- this release was more low-key for most of Fedora-land. Workstation saw updates to notifications and general theme'ing improvements, Gnome Software got AppData integration to bring the Software Center closer to an app-store experience. Of course Gnome Boxes and Gnome Builder were included as well, allowing for more out-of-the-box developer improvements in the realm of Virutalization and IDE's, respectively. But there weren't any ground breaking features across the board -- no swapping of the init system, no BTRFS, no Wayland by default, although GDM is running the Login Screen through Wayland.

For the spins it was much the same: XFCE saw the usual round of upgrades, LXDE got some upgrades here and there, Cinnamon will be getting a new major release here eventually. The only spin that got something ground breaking though was the KDE spin.

Side-by-side screenshots in this article are comparing Fedora 21 KDE (left) to Fedora 22 KDE (right).

Fedora 22 finally brings the "Plasma 5" desktop to the stable, non-copr, releases, and after using it for the last week or so.. I am impressed with this release.

I always like re-installing Fedora from scratch, just to see what new changes the Development teams have made to the Installation process and this release was no different. The first immediate change to the installer is that Anaconda is no longer a full screen application, it is now a maximized window. Personally I think that maximized it is still wasting space, but at least its a slightly less egregious waste than before.

Beyond that, the Fedora 22 Anaconda seems to have updated its GTK theme, or KDE updated its GTK-Qt theme, because Anaconda looks like a native program now. Previously one could see the seams between the two looks due to variations in color gradients, or text boxes not looking quite-right, but now the seams are almost non-existent.

Other than those two immediate changes, the rest of the changes are mostly tiny alterations here or there. The larger changes, such as removal of various spokes, or maybe the removal of the entire 'hub and spoke' design as a whole will come in Fedora 23, later this year, or Fedora 24 next year.