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The KDE Project released today KDE Plasma 5.22 as the next major series of their acclaimed, modern, and powerful desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems.
Highlights of the KDE Plasma 5.22 release include the implementation of the new Plasma System Monitor app introduced in the KDE Plasma 5.21 release as the default system monitoring app and a replacement for the KDE System Guard, also known as KSysGuard, application.
Another major change in this release is the new adaptive panel transparency feature that promises to help you make both the panel and the panel widgets more transparent. In addition, KDE Plasma 5.22 has great overall Wayland support, especially for activities and support for searching through menu items from the Global Menu applet.
The System Settings has been updated to let you disable offline updates on GNU/Linux distributions that enables them by default, such as KDE neon, or to let you enable them on distributions that do not offer this feature. Also in System Settings, there are great improvements to the accessibility and keyboard navigability.
Improvements were also brought to the Task Manager’s “Highlight Windows” feature, which can now only highlight windows when hovering over their thumbnail in the tooltip by default. Moreover, KDE Plasma 5.22 makes it possible to change the text size in sticky note widgets.
But wait, there’s more, as the System Tray applets are now more consistent in appearance and usability, the Digital Clock applet popup has been revamped for usability and accessibility, and it’s now possible to force it to display the date on the same line as the time on tall panels.
The Audio Volume system tray applet now lets you directly select the device profile for your audio devices from the applet, you can now open the clipboard history at any time with the Meta+V keyboard shortcut, and KRunner now shows multi-line text for search results and no longer returns duplicate results from different runners.
Of course, there are numerous performance improvements, especially to the KWin window and composite manager to work better on Wayland thanks to support for direct scan-out for full-screen windows on non-NVIDIA GPUs, support for variable refresh rates, support for hot-plugging GPUs, support for setting overscan values, support for vertical and horizontal maximization, and better support for multi-screen setups.
The KDE Plasma 5.22 desktop environment will soon arrive in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, especially rolling releases like KDE neon, Arch Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Solus. It’s a recommended upgrade for everyone using KDE Plasma 5.21. For more details, check out the release announcement page.
Last updated 3 years ago
