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The KDE Project announced today the release and general availability of KDE Plasma 5.25 as the latest stable series of this beloved graphical desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.
Four months in the making, the KDE Plasma 5.25 desktop environment series is here to introduce exciting new features like full control of the Tablet Mode from both Wayland and X11 sessions, new finger-following (1:1) touchpad gestures for touch-friendly devices, a configuration window for KRunner, as well as a new floating mode for the panel that detaches it from the bottom of the screen to look more like a dock.
KDE Plasma 5.25 also comes with a complete rewrite of both Present Windows and the Desktop Grid, automatic synchronization of accent colors with the desktop wallpaper (supports slideshow wallpapers too), the ability to tint all colors of any color scheme using the accent color, and a new smooth cross-fade effect when changing between old and new color schemes.
There’s also support for configuring all the buttons of Wacom ExpressKey Remote devices, the ability to access and manipulate Plasma layouts assigned to other screens from a central location in the global Edit Mode toolbar, a new “Crashed Processes Viewer” app, as well as the ability to select the parts of the desktop layout that you want to change when applying a Global Theme in System Settings.
In addition, KDE Plasma now features a user-facing Touch Mode that turns on whenever the screen is detached or rotated 360 degrees, lets you edit color schemes to make the accent color subtly tint all of its colors and set accent colors to be automatically generated based on the colors of your current desktop wallpaper, and improves the System Monitor app with a new option to make a page start loading data as soon as the app is opened.
For the Plasma Wayland session, KDE Plasma 5.25 improves multi-finger touchscreen gestures and the “slide” gesture to switch virtual desktops to follow your fingers, improves the user experience for gamers by disabling the screen edge actions, adds the ability to change the screen resolution to resolutions beyond the officially supported ones, and adds support for the “screencast session restore” protocol for better integration of apps using XDG portals, such as Flatpaks and Snaps.
Also improved in KDE Plasma 5.25 is the Plasma Discover graphical package manager, which received a redesigned Application page, the ability to display the apps’ level of access to resources on your system, support for deleting the settings and user data of Flatpak apps, the ability to warn users about the risks of installing proprietary software, support for showing the size of installed apps and other content on the “Installed” page, as well as support for the “Dynamic launcher” portal for better integration of Flatpak and Snap apps.
Among other noteworthy changes, KDE Plasma 5.25 adds support for activating KWin effects using touch screen edge swipes, lets you add more locations and places to the “Favorites” list/grid in Kickoff, Kicker, and the Application Dashboard, adds an option to exclude minimized windows from the Overview effect, adds a live effect to the Night Color feature, and updates the Info Center’s “About this System” page to display more relevant information about your hardware.
But wait, there’s more! KDE Plasma 5.25 comes with better support for GTK apps that use the Breeze GTK theme to match the styling of Qt/KDE apps, adds the ability to edit the Halt and Reboot commands in System Settings’ Login Screen (SDDM) page, introduces a “shake” effect for the login screen when the wrong credentials are inserted, and updates many applets, widgets, and various System Settings pages with new features and improvements.
The KDE Plasma 5.25 desktop environment will soon make its way into the stable software repositories of various popular GNU/Linux distributions that ship with KDE Plasma, including KDE neon, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Garuda Linux KDE Edition, Arch Linux, and even Kubuntu by using the Kubuntu Backports PPA. KDE Plasma 5.25 will be supported with five maintenance updates until September 2022.
Last updated 2 years ago
