KDE Plasma 5.24 Beta Released with New Overview Effect, Fingerprint Support, and More

KDE Plasma 5.24 Beta

The KDE Project announced today the release of the beta version of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.24 desktop environment series, a major update that comes with lots of new features and improvements.

KDE Plasma 5.24 comes with numerous changes that will make many of you happy. For example, it introduces the long-anticipated support for fingerprint readers to unlock the screen, as well as to authenticate in apps that require administration password, and also to authenticate with sudo on the command-line.

Another interesting feature of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.24 desktop environment series is a brand-new Overview effect that lets users control their virtual workspaces and find search results from KRunner, all in one place. The new Overview effect can be toggled with the Super+W keyboard shortcut and has a blurred background by default.

KWin Overview effect
KWin Overview effect – Image credits: Nate Graham

The Plasma Wayland session continues to receive improvements in KDE Plasma 5.24, which introduces support for colors greater than 8-bit, a new drawing tablet page in System Settings, support for the “Minimize All Windows” widget, “DRM leasing” support, and the concept of the “primary monitor”.

In addition, the Spectacle screenshot utility gained access to the “Active Window” mode in Plasma Wayland, which improves stylus support and lets users cycle through more than two activities at a time when using the Super+Tab keyboard shortcut.

Among other noteworthy changes, the KDE Plasma 5.24 desktop environment promises a more modern design for the “Plasma Pass” password manager, full keyboard navigation for the Clipboard and Network system tray widgets, much improved Breeze theme and system notifications, as well as updated KRunner and Task Manager tools.

But wait, that’s not all, as KDE Plasma 5.24 also improves System Settings to let you choose your own custom accent colors, support for the “Highlight Changed Settings” option in Night Color, support for more batteries in the battery charge limit feature, and the ability for the Display & Monitor page to show the scale factor used for each screen.

It also looks like the QtQuick-based effects in the KDE Plasma 5.24 desktop environment will work better on NVIDIA GPUs, and Plasma will now shut down faster than before. Of course, there are numerous other changes that you can check out in the release announcement page.

KDE Plasma 5.24 Beta is available for public testing right now via the Unstable edition of the KDE neon GNU/Linux distribution, which you can download from here. However, please be aware that this is a pre-release version aimed at testers that want to help the devs correct problems in KDE’s Plasma desktop.

The final KDE Plasma 5.24 release will be available on February 8th, 2022.

Last updated 2 years ago

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