KDE Plasma 5.24.5 LTS Released with Even More Plasma Wayland Improvements, Bug Fixes

KDE Plasma 5.24.5

The KDE Project announced today KDE Plasma 5.24.5 as the fifth maintenance update to the latest and greatest KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS desktop environment series, bringing even more improvements and fixing annoying bugs.

Coming five weeks after KDE Plasma 5.24.4, the KDE Plasma 5.24.5 update is here with even more Plasma Wayland session improvements and bug fixes. For example, it adds a fix for a KWin crash that could occur when the screen was locked, a fix for various visual glitches when unlocking the screen, improves KWin’s “Virtual Desktops” window rule to work as expected, and a fix for a bug crashing SDL apps (e.g. games) when unplugging an external monitor.

In addition, KDE Plasma 5.24.5 includes a fix for another bug that could crash the KWin window and composite manager when a connected USB-C monitor wakes up from its power-save state, a fix for another KWin crashing bug that could occur when an app misbehaves, as well as another issue causing KWin to crash when changing your screen’s configuration in certain ways, such as rotating and moving the screen without also changing the refresh rate.

On top of that, the Plasma Wayland session was improved to add X11’s orange “needs attention” background color on the window’s icon in Task Manager for windows that request activation using the official Wayland activation protocol.

“If you encounter an app that does not get the orange background on its Task Manager icon when it fails to activate (e.g. when clicking on a notification sent by Thunderbird or Telegram), this means that the app in question does not implement the activation protocol at all, and it should! So go report this to its developers,” said developer Nate Graham.

The Plasma Discover package manager was improved as well in the KDE Plasma 5.24.5 release to allow the installation of updates for packages that have multiple architectures available, as well as to improve support for Flatpak apps by fixing a visual glitch with the “Install” button after installing an app and addressing a crash that could occur when visiting the Installed page of a Flatpak app when the Flatpak backend is activated with certain types of Flatpak remotes.

KDE Plasma 5.24.5 also improves the Global Menu widget to work properly when enabling its optional “be a hamburger menu” mode and to no longer display hidden menus for certain apps, improves the Battery widget to always appear in the system tray after logging in, updates the Comics widget to work as expected, and adds the ability to delete the Widget Explorer sidebar when it is closed in an attempt to save more memory.

Furthermore, it adds support for desktop icons to remember their positions on a per-resolution basis and ensures that manually-arranged desktop icons are no longer reset to an alphabetical sorting mode when restarting the computer, and improves accent colors to no longer get darken when using a dark base color scheme.

Other than that, KDE Plasma 5.24.5 further improves support for monitors so that they won’t power-cycle in a loop after connecting them, allows all users to change the apps in the Favorites section of the Kickoff and Kicker application menus while preserving the changes during restart, and fixes the Meta+[number] keyboard shortcut for activating Task Manager tasks to work as expected in all possible scenarios.

Last but not least, this release improves Plasma’s search functionality in KRunner, Application Launcher, and the Overview mode to also return matches that are text files, fixes the “Change Wallpaper…” button in System Settings’ Quick Settings page to work when there are multiple Activities enabled, and addresses a random Plasma crash that could occur when there’s more than one app with multiple windows opened and you interact with one of their Task Manager tooltips.

Some visual glitches with the folder popup were addressed as well to allow an additional grid cell, the Plasma Audio Volume Control widget’s subwoofer test was fixed, and many other smaller issues have been patched to make KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS desktop environment series more reliable and stable. For extra reading, check out the full changelog, which includes details for all 73 changes included in the KDE Plasma 5.24.5 update.

Last updated 2 years ago

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