Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu's spin focused on multimedia aspects, switches to KDE Plasma starting from the next release, Ubuntu Studio 20.10. To announce it was the developers through the official blog. So Ubuntu Studio 20.04, available a few days ago, is the latest version of the distro to be based on Xfce. The news has been official for a few weeks but I only speak to you today because we can finally take a look at the first renderings with Plasma.
Although still in its infancy, the transition is proceeding quite well. Transition intended mainly because the KDE desktop environment offers better tools (for artists and photographers) such as Krita and Gwenview and better support for Wacom tablets. Also, it must be remembered, in the past, the development team had tried to release two versions, one with Xfce and the other with Plasma, then abandoning it due to lack of resources. So Plasma was already in the thoughts of the dev.
Ubuntu Studio 20.10 says Plasma
The Ubuntu Studio developers are working, together with the Kubuntu and KDE teams, on this transition and I can already show you the first render:
 |
| US 20.10 Groovy Gorilla with KDE Plasma 5.18. Dolphin and Kdenlive in action |
The progress is good and the team says that the transition is "almost complete", some minor aspects related to the selection of themes are still missing.
We hope this "new" Ubuntu Studio will guarantee a pleasant experience.
Even from the performance point of view, it seems that things are going according to plan. Ubuntu Studio 20.04 LTS based on Xfce, at the first startup in live uses 620 MB of RAM. The daily build of Ubuntu Studio 20.10 based on KDE Plasma 5.18, always started live, uses about 670 MB of RAM. The difference of 50 MB quite negligible and mainly due to the greater lightness of Xfce. Furthermore, as specified by the developers on the official blog, we are not talking about a distro designed to run on older PCs. So the choice of Plasma seems much more appropriate than Xfce.
Among the things that still need to be fixed are, for example, the installer. The Qt version of Ubuntu Ubiquity installer (i.e. the tool that installs the operating system) still shows the Kubuntu logo. I will keep you updated in the coming months
0 Comments