KDE Plasma 5.27.3 Enables Night Light on ARM Devices That Don’t Support Gamma LUTs

The KDE Project released today KDE Plasma 5.27.3 as the third maintenance update to the latest KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS desktop environment series to add more improvements and fix bugs.

KDE Plasma 5.27.3 is here two weeks after KDE Plasma 5.27.2 and enables the Night Color feature on ARM devices that don’t support Gamma LUTs but support Color Transform Matrices, such as the Acer Spin 513 Chromebook with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c SoC.

The Plasma Wayland session continues to be improved, and KDE Plasma 5.27.3 comes with an improvement to the SDDM login screen for touchscreens that was also implemented in the KDE Frameworks 5.104 software suite released last week. This allows opening the virtual keyboard by tapping on its button and scrolling of the keyboard layout list with a swipe gesture.

Screencasting was also improved for Plasma Wayland by preventing the swapping of red and blue color channels, as well as the clipboard history to allow you to copy text with a single copy action instead of two when it’s set to only one item. Moreover, Plasma Wayland received a fix that could crash some apps when a display goes to sleep.

KDE Plasma 5.27.3 also implements a 15-minute sleep timeout for inactivity by default for new users and correctly generates power profiles for convertible laptops, and addresses a crash with the powerdevil power management subsystem on some multi-screen setups.

Various polishing was done as well to improve support for Breeze-themed GTK apps by correctly displaying image buttons and linked buttons, as well as the rows of buttons on Discover’s app pages to become columns for narrow windows or on mobile devices.

Furthermore, KDE Plasma 5.27.3 no longer uses the new portal-based “Open With” dialog for non-portal-using apps (for now) and fixes an issue with desktop icons for the current activity where they would inappropriately re-arrange themselves on multi-screen setups when changing the set of connected screens.

“However, during the process of investigation, we discovered that the code for storing desktop file position is inherently problematic and in need of a fundamental rewrite just like we did for the multi-screen arrangement in Plasma 5.27,” said KDE developer Nate Graham. “This will be done for Plasma 6.0, and hopefully make Plasma’s long history of being bad about remembering desktop icon positions just that–history.”

There are various other smaller bug fixes included in the KDE Plasma 5.27.3 update, so check out the full changelog for more details. Meanwhile, keep an eye on the stable software repositories of your GNU/Linux distribution for the 5.27.3 packages and update your installations as soon as they arrive for a better and more stable Plasma desktop experience.

The next maintenance update, KDE Plasma 5.27.4, is planned for April 4th, 2023.

Last updated 1 year ago