KDE Plasma 5.20 Desktop Enters Beta, Final Release Expected on October 13

KDE Plasma 5.20 Beta

The KDE Project launched today the beta version of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.20 desktop environment, which looks to be one off the biggest releases of all time.

After several months of development, during which the KDE development team managed to add numerous new features and improvements, the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.20 desktop environment is now available for public beta testing if you’re a bleeding-edge user wanting to get an early taste of the changes.

As I wrote here, KDE Plasma 5.20 is packed with countless of enhancements. But that’s just a part of the changes that landed in this version, which looks to be a massive release (probably the biggest so far).

There are improvements everywhere, starting with a new look and feel consisting of an icon-only Task Manager that comes with lots of changes, a slightly thicker default panel, redesigned OSDs for brightness and volume, improvements to the Digital Clock applet, and a new default shortcut for moving and resizing windows (Meta+drag).

Many smaller, yet important changes were made around the KRunner launcher, which now runs in a standalone, free-floating window. But KDE Plasma 5.20 brings lots of other enhancements to many parts of the desktop environment to make your experience better and more enjoyable.

Wayland support continues to be improved with each new Plasma release, and version 5.20 brings screencasting support, the ability to paste things in KDE apps using the middle mouse click, support for the Klipper clipboard app, adjustable scroll speeds for mouse and touchpad, as well as much-improved stability.

The System Settings have also been improved in the upcoming release, now featuring notifications for S.M.A.R.T monitoring and disk failures, redesigned Autostart, Bluetooth, and User Manager pages, a new Shortcuts page that unifies the Standard Shortcuts and Global Shortcuts pages, support for configuring the touchpad cursor speed, and a new audio balance option in Sound settings to adjust the volume of each audio channel.

The full changelog lists more than 500 changes in KDE Plasma 5.20, if you have the time to go through all of them. But all in all, it’s indeed a massive release, and you can try the beta version right now by following the instructions provided the KDE Project in the release notes.

The final release of the KDE Plasma 5.20 desktop environment is expected on October 13th, 2020. Until then, if you’re a fan of the Plasma desktop, I highly recommend that you update to the latest KDE Plasma 5.19.5 release.

Image: KDE Project

Last updated 4 years ago

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