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The KDE Project released today KDE Plasma 5.26 as the newest stable series of this acclaimed, modern, and widely-used desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions, mobile devices, and smart TVs.
About four months in the works, KDE Plasma 5.26 is packed with many exciting new features, starting with a new user interface for smart TVs called Plasma Bigscreen. KDE’s new Plasma Bigscreen interface runs on top of either postmarketOS or Manjaro Linux and promises to turn your TV or set-top box (STB) into a fully hackable device.
Plasma Bigscreen features Aura Browser as a new web browser for a fully immersed “Big Screen” experience, as well as Plank Player, a multimedia player for playing local files, both of them being fully controllable with the remote control of your TV or set-top box. Under the hood, Plasma Bigscreen runs on top of Wayland.
Talking about Wayland, the KDE Plasma 5.26 release adds many great changes, including the ability to force the Maliit virtual keyboard to appear when in Touch mode, the ability to adjust the input area maps of a graphics tablet to your screen coordinates, and the ability to disable middle-click paste.
The Plasma Wayland session should now also work better on HiDPI displays by implementing two methods of scaling apps, which now look much better than before. The first one uses a compositor for uniform scaling with blurriness, while the second one is done by the apps themselves using pre-existing X11 HiDPI capabilities to avoid blurriness.
Other big changes in the KDE Plasma 5.26 desktop environment include support for re-bindable mouse buttons for multi-button mice so you can assign buttons to keystrokes or keyboard shortcuts, full-screen reader support for all Plasma widgets, keyboard navigation support in more applets, and a new Compact mode for the Kickoff applications menu that lets you see more items.
Improvements were also brought to the Plasma Discover graphical package manager, which now features support for displaying content ratings of apps, support for changing the frequency of update notifications, a new option to change the name used for submitting an app review, a new ‘Share’ button on an app’s details page to more easily share apps, and the ability to check for free space before updating the system.
The Kickoff applications menu has been updated as well to display text and remove its icon when using a horizontal panel, the Night Color page in System Settings received a new option to let you change the day color too and the ability to use a map to choose a manual location, and the Task Switcher got the ability to sort minimized tasks to be listed after all unminimized tasks.
The Plasma System Monitor app and Plasma widgets of the same name now support querying CPU sensors for minimum, maximum, and average temperature and frequency. Also, it’s now possible to add a keyboard shortcut for activating the Present Windows effect when showing only the windows from the current app on the current workspace.
On top of all that, KDE Plasma 5.26 also adds support for configuring what happens when you activate a window on another workspace, support for setting a default paper size when printing, support for changing the way the system formats addresses, names, and phone numbers, support for Light and Dark wallpapers, and support for using animated images as wallpapers.
But wait, that’s not all, as KDE Plasma 5.26 also brings support for the “Array,” “F5,” and “Fortinet” protocols in the OpenConnect VPN plugin of the Plasma Network manager, the ability for Global Themes to change the order and arrangements of titlebar buttons, support for a wider range of hardware and firmware in the “About This System” page in System Settings, as well as the ability to set an alternate calendar inside the main calendar.
Among other noteworthy changes, KDE Plasma 5.26 adds resize support for the pop-ups of Plasma widgets in the panel from their edges and corners, implements KPipewire as components related to Flatpak ‘pipewire’ use in the Plasma desktop, adds support for filtering windows when typing in the Overview effect, and makes it easier to preview wallpapers just by clicking on them on the desktop.
Of course, there are also numerous bug fixes and performance improvements for a more stable and reliable Plasma desktop experience. Check out the full changelog for more details and keep an eye on the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution for the KDE Plasma 5.26 desktop environment.
Last updated 2 years ago
