It’s been 3 months since the last plasma-nm (Plasma networkmanagement) release and we have been working really hard to bring you again a better release than the previous one. Unlike previous releases, this one is focused on internal changes which are not mostly noticeable on the outside, but I believe they are welcomed.

The most significant internal change is a new model. This one is more complex and easier to maintain and one of it’s advantages is that we can now use it also in the connection editor, so if there is a problem we can just fix it in one place. It should better handle various cases which were not properly handled in previous versions, like when you have more wireless cards. Also various NetworkManager changes are now properly propagated to the applet, i.e. we are not now limited to three connection states (disconnected, connecting, connected) as before, but when you activate your connection you will see the exact device state like “getting IP address” or “waiting for authorization” and so on. Regarding the connection editor, you can now activate/deactivate connections there which is probably something what nobody will use, but since this is possible because of the new model, then why not to add this option.

From visible changes I could mention new notifications. I added various notifications to inform you about successful or failed actions. This is quite useful when you do some action and nothing happens, usually when you are not authorized to do it. You can see new available notifications on the screenshot below.

Note: This screenshot is from Plasma 5 version and unfortunately not all notifications are also available in KDE 4 version, because I had to change API in libnm-qt (NetworkManagerQt) and this was possible only in the Qt5 version which is not released yet.

We were also working a lot on porting plasma-nm to KDE Frameworks 5 and I’m happy that plasma-nm is now part of Plasma 5 which means it will be released together and regularly also with bugfix releases, so you won’t have to always wait until we decide to bring you a new version. This change came quite late and there were no tarballs previously available until now, so I would really appreciate if you can test it together with the rest of Plasma 5. Regarding the KDE 4 version, we will probably release it together with Plasma 5 release, but if you want to try it now, you can just compile it from git and use branch called 0.9.3.

Here are some screenshots from Plasma 5 version. As you can see Plasma 5 version has a scrollbar o/. Unlike KDE 4 version there is no traffic monitor, because it hasn’t been ported yet, but we will add it in future and details will probably get a new look.

I hope you will like all the changes above and please do not forget to report all issues you spotted to our bugzilla.