Plasma 5.10 is amazing!

A few days ago I spent some time upgrading my main desktop to a stable Plasma Workspace, or for short 5.10. It is well known Plasma (KDE) is my only and true desktop, and there as a time when my computer was always compiling and upgrading the desktop, but in these days I tend to stay with a working instance the most and tend not to upgrade it quite often due to the fact that I need more computer power and time to make things done than to upgrade my desktop. This also means that what I find as new in this Plasma version could be a well established feature in previous versions and I was not aware of them or never tried directly. Anyway, the update was a little problematic, but that was mainly due to the automatic upgrade of the Linux distribution I use, and that is another reason I tend to stay behind the bleeding edge version. Once finished I was astonished! First of all, Breeze is a really great theme, must better than the ugly (to me) Air and more consistent as it was the old Oxygen. The dark theme is very relaxing for who has eye problems like me. Desktop effects work like a charm, and the application dashboard is something really cute, and much more useful than other desktop activities (yes Gnome, I’m looking at you!), even if text search is a little slower (I believe that’s due to the semantic desktop search). I tried the Global Menu for applications, something like what OS 9 had several years ago (and yes, also KDE 1 did!), but I’m quite greedy on screen space, so I disabled it after a few hours. Instead, the choice of the menu within the application title bar is a lot more useful for me, especially if you think I tend to do a lot of things thru keyboard shortcuts (and therefore not needing the menu at all). I showed my desktop to a few friends, and they pointed out that it was really similar to the OS X workspace. It could be, I’m not sure since I’m not working with Apple systems by far, but I have to say that Plasma is deploying a rich and elegant workspace for free, do other vendors do the same?