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Tiled Menu is also available in Plasma as a replacement for the CinnVIIStarkMenu for the Cinnamon desktop’s Familiar layout option. The Simple Menu, a Slingshot-style menu for Plasma, is the default menu for the new Feren OS (aka KDE) layout. It is definitely a different menu experience than the main Cinnamon menu. It is the default menu for the default Feren OS (aka KDE) layout. This lets you put your application menus back in the panel, or as a button in the title bar of every window.Īnother example is the Simple Menu, a Slingshot-style menu for Plasma. You can add this functionality as a widget and as an optional title bar button.
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The updated menu styles bring a new degree of menu functionality. This results in even more settings that can be changed, including the Files look and feel, GTK Theme and more.
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A related significant back-end change is that in Feren OS Classic, the overall theme page in System Settings -> Themes has been ported to Plasma as an expansion of Plasma’s Global Theme changer. Many of the operational changes and the subtle tweaking to blend the two styles into one become more obvious the longer you go through menus and work with the applications.įor instance, Feren OS’ theme utility is now an expansion of the Global Theme tool in KDE Plasma in the new Feren OS.
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The KDE style design is well blended with the overall appearance of Feren OS running the Cinnamon desktop. Until you get into the system settings, it is difficult to distinguish one or the other except for a few features. However, the Feren OS version of the KDE Plasma desktop is so well integrated and edited that the Cinnamon look and feel is generally the more predominant UI. At first blush, that assessment is mostly accurate. The Feren OS website presents the new version’s change of direction as a familiar experience with a desktop that is more refined and better than Cinnamon. I was able to finesse some of the Plasma system settings to retain parts of the Cinnamon look and feel, but the KDE and Cinnamon desktops ultimately are different in both the UI and under the hood. Major changes in the KDE Plasma default application set touch productivity and system tools.
#ZORIN OS APPLETS DESKLETS SOFTWARE#
The developers swapped new default applications that are more in tune with the KDE software family. The new Feren OS was a year in the making.įor existing Feren OS users, the new Plasma desktop offering may be a little jarring. The original release date for the new snapshot was delayed by two months so the finalized product could be as polished as possible for a first release.
#ZORIN OS APPLETS DESKLETS UPDATE#
For those users who stick with the Cinnamon version, that update includes mostly cosmetic changes to themes and minor visual tweaks. Plasma has much more support from the community as one of the major desktop environments available in Linux, the developer noted. Current users, at least for now, can skip using the transition tool and continue with the existing Cinnamon desktop. The tweaked user interface provides improved functionality. The result is a look and feel that resembles the Cinnamon design. The transition tool gives current users an option to keep many of their existing Cinnamon settings. It comes with a transition tool that literally rolls the updated system components in the 2019.12 snapshot release into the modified KDE desktop.
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This new Feren OS release meets the goal of mixing something familiar (the Cinnamon desktop) with a more capable desktop (KDE Plasma 5) to make a better distro. The Feren OS community also released a mostly maintenance snapshot update for the Feren OS Cinnamon version, which is now called “Feren OS Classic.” The developer of the British-made Linux distro explained in the change notice over the holidays that no decision had been made about keeping the Cinnamon desktop version beyond its approaching end-of-support date. Right-click anywhere to get a popup menu that provides access to specialized Plasma UI features without cluttering up the desktop view.
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