Plasma Active, the KDE project that aims to create an open source user environment for tablets and mobile devices has had its second release. Earlier this year, they released Plasma Active One, their first preview release of many, that showcased their new Contour UI and activities.
Now they have made their second release Plasma Active Two which takes into account some of the feedback received for Plasma Active One. A major new feature has been added to Plasma Active that might be one of the central USPs of the platform when it is finally released.
This new feature is recommendations. Plasma Active allows you to divide your work into “activities”. Each activity being a collection of and related data that are for a particular purpose. It can be a great productivity boost to only have applications and data related to that particular task at hand. Recommendations adds another productivity enhancement to activities; the Plasma Active shell can now offer recommendations of related resources based on your usage patterns. KDE has some of the best and most integrated semantic features. All applications share related data, which means related data is easier to retrieve whenever you need it. The more you work on KDE the more it knows about you and the better it can serve you. Best of all, this is entirely local, no internet services are used in process to your privacy is maintained.
Plasma Active Two also delivers a number of performance enhancements, and aims to be able to run on under 256MB RAM on computers slower than 1GHz. The performance improvements in Plasma Active Two make it as much as 10 times faster in some cases! All these performance enhancements will also improve the performance of KDE on desktops as a majority of the code base is he same, only the interface differs.
Unfortunately, installing operating systems is already quite complex, and this complexity is further compounded by the locked down nature of the devices on which KDE Plasma Active is to run, tablets. So it is good to know that: “At least two announcements are expected within the next month about the availability of tablets with Plasma Active Two pre-installed.”
You can find out more about how to download and the latest version of Plasma Active from here. If you don’t have a supported tablet, you’ll have to make do with the following video for now: