Well, for one, I dislike the tabbed menu KDE has by default, so I usually do a right click and "Classic Menu Style". Student said that was gone (I haven't tried out 15  yet). Also that you can't easily set the desktop to "folder view" either.  If those are true, that's not a good sign for the rest of it. I need to get the live DVD and test it myself.

Phil W

On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 1:39 PM, Brian Cluff <brian@snaptek.com> wrote:
On 10/13/2015 06:14 PM, Phil Waclawski wrote:
Yes, and the UNITY thing on Ubuntu also beat windows 8 to the punch.
That was when I switched to Kubuntu.  I've had a student testing kubuntu
15 and it looks like the customizations I normally do to KDE have been
disabled (or hidden) in KDE 5....may start looking at Mint or something
else.

Just curious, what customizations are you finding that are missing? In my option Kubuntu 15.04 was really a rough release and I haven't recommend it to much of anyone. Plasma 5 appears to have been adopted about 2 months too soon to make it the default desktop in Kubuntu. After about 2 months you could load the Kubuntu backports PPA and that would make things fairly nice.

There are a small handful of plasmoids that didn't make the port over to the plasma 5 environment, one of my favorites being the the "quicklaunch" plasmoid. At first I was pissed, but on doing some research I found out that the quicklaunch plasmoid has been abandoned by the author for years so it was bound to get dropped anyway. The good thing is that the effective functionality of the quicklaunch plasmoid has been pulled into the folderview plasmoid which changes it's behavior if it's put into a panel.

Anyway, cut to the as unreleased Kubunutu 15.10... It's a whole different beast compared to the 15.04 rlease, and in my opinion is what should have been the initial plasma 5 desktop release. All the crashes are now gone. Most of the missing features are back and the still missing ones are most likely your least used features and should be back in shortly. The desktop is silky smooth and noticeably faster than the 14.x versions of KDE. Of course it could also be argued that Kubuntu wouldn't have been in such a good state if it hadn't released plasma 5 to the wild when it did... oh well, it is what it is.

If you are currently running 14.04LTS then I believe that by the time you upgrade to the next LTS in 6 months, the desktop should be just a faster, smoother version of what you already know... only better.
If you are looking to upgrade sooner, then I think you'll still find the desktop in excellent shape... It might be missing a few minor features right now, but there is often a workaround till the feature gets added back in in the near future.

Probably the biggest change that might bite you is that KDE is now storing it's configurations in more standard locations like .config, .local, etc and a small number of other paths have changed as well, like the path to the service menus. A quick mv and a softlink quickly take care of the legacy location on an updated box.

Brian Cluff

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