Before the KDE 4.1 release in 2008, Aaron Seigo announced the end of desktop icons. He was being provocative, because what he was really announcing was the end of being restricted to a single icon set. Instead, KDE Plasma began supporting multiple desktops, and with them several ways to swap sets of icons in and out. These changes have received little publicity, but they are ideal for quickly customizing a desktop for a specialized task.

You do not have to use these features. However, if you choose to explore them, you can apply them not only to the main desktop, but also to any activities, or even any virtual workspaces, so long as you first select from the main menu System Settings > Workspace Behavior > Virtual Desktop > Different Widgets for each desktop. It's all a matter of which combination of customizations you prefer: a default desktop, folder views, multiple desktop folders, or a single desktop folder with filters.

Also:

• KDE Plasma 5.6 Is Getting Ready With More Wayland Improvements

  KDE's Martin Gräßlin has provided a status update concerning KWin/Wayland support with the latest KDE stack.

  Martin Gräßlin has been spending most of his time recently focusing upon the KDE input support for Wayland and better supporting libinput. There's been a lot of code clean-ups and bug fixes as well as bringing input features closer to parity between X11 and Wayland.

• KDE Plasma 5.6 Beta Released

  The KDE community has banded together to release the Plasma 5.6 beta today.

  KDE Plasma 5.6 is bringing improvements to the default Breeze theme as well as to the light and dark versions, task manager improvements, smoother widgets, a weather widget has finally returned to Plasma 5, and plenty of Wayland improvements. Plasma 5.6 has also been prepping Plymouth boot screen and GRUB boot-loader screens designed around the Breeze theme in aiming to complete the KDE computing experience.

• Tumbleweed gets KDE app store

  Since the last update on openSUSE Tumbleweed, there have been five snapshots and some of those snapshots have brought some interesting new packages.

  The 20160225 snapshot allows Tumbleweed users to add a package called ‘discover‘, which is the KDE software installer, implemented as an app store like application.