Plasma 5.25 is now available in Feren OS
I’m happy to announce the release of KDE Plasma 5.25 to Feren OS’s latest release, now available via Update Manager!
You can see what the changes to KDE Plasma upstream are at https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.25.0/ and https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.25.3/.
Compared to past Plasma releases, nothing much has changed in terms of patches — in fact, there are now less patches made to KDE Plasma as some of the patches to Global Theme are now official as of KDE Plasma 5.25! That means you can now also customise what you apply in your Global Theme no matter the Operating System, so long as it uses KDE Plasma! (oh, and the accent colour improvements made for Feren OS are now official, too)
Anyway, now to explain why this release took so long to make it into Feren OS — atop working on some other projects, this release also comes with a ton of improvements, which are listed right below:
Changes to Feren OS
The default accent colour is now wallpaper-dependant
Feren OS, as of KDE Plasma 5.25, now defaults to using your current wallpaper to determine your accent colour. Of course, you can always go into System Settings -> Appearance -> Colours to turn it off and use normal accent colours again, but for those who aren’t keen on a single accent colour, this should add an element of eye-candy to their Feren OS desktops.
Note: This may apply automatically to all users updating their systems who haven’t disabled accent colours usage — if it does, you can revert back to accent colours using the aforementioned steps.
All the themes now have their own distinct wallpapers
Another change made behind the scenes is a change to how Feren OS’s Plasma configuration sets its default wallpaper — now rather than overriding the configuration file it is now determined by the layout itself (thus making the default wallpaper applying consistent with all other KDE Plasma distributors).
Due to this change, applying Breeze’s Global Theme and Desktop Layout now applies the official KDE Plasma wallpaper, however I did not stop there. Every single Feren OS theme now has a unique wallpaper:
Their wallpapers will apply when their Desktop Layouts are applied, though you can also find them at any time in the normal wallpaper selector, as well.
As for the default Feren OS Global Themes — they will still use the default Feren OS wallpaper when applying their Desktop Layouts, as you would expect them all to.
Misc. changes
- The Status Notch has been updated slightly to accomodate for the KDE Plasma panel spacing bug having been entirely fixed
- The Lock Screen has been rewritten using the Plasma 5.25 Breeze codebase, so that it can work on KDE Plasma 5.25 and onwards
feren-kde-theme-patcheswas updated to remove the custom Breeze Desktop Layout scripts made for Feren OS’s patches as it now officially has a Desktop Layout script as of Plasma 5.25- All the Global Themes and Plasma Styles now use the new Plasma metadata format
- Clock (Feren OS) was rewritten on 5.25.2’s Digital Clock codebase to keep it consistent with the current Digital Clock experience
- Toolbar configs for KWrite, etc. were bumped to the latest version numbering
- Feren OS’s Plasma Styles now have working/up-to-date wallpaper values set
