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The KDE Project announced today the general availability of the KDE Plasma 5.27 desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions, a major release that introduces several new features and many improvements.
Highlights of KDE Plasma 5.27 include a new Plasma Welcome app that helps newcomers to the KDE Plasma desktop environment easily and quickly configure various aspects like enabling Plasma Vaults, connecting their online accounts or mobile devices, adding more apps, etc.
Another cool new feature in KDE Plasma 5.27 is tiling support for those with a large monitor. Tiling can be enabled and configured by pressing the Meta(Super)+T keyboard shortcut and there are three layouts to choose from. Windows can be placed in the tiled layout by holding Shift and dragging them to the edge of the screen until they stick.
Multi-monitor support has been greatly improved in this release, which adds the Display Configuration widget by default in the system tray area to help you more quickly change the screen layout and other settings.
Fans of Flatpak apps will be happy to learn that KDE Plasma now comes with Flatpak permissions settings integrated into the System Settings app to let you take full control of your Flatpak apps.
Other noteworthy changes include support for the Hebrew calendar in the Digital Clock popup’s calendar, which can be enabled from Digital Clock Settings > Calendar > Alternate Calendar > Hebrew Calendar, a revamped Color Picker app, an improved Plasma Calculator widget, and many Plasma Wayland improvements like the ability to send pen tilt and rotation events to apps.
On top of that, the System Settings app received various enhancements to the Icons, Launch Feedback, Shortcuts, and Window Switcher pages, and the “Highlight Changed Settings” button was moved to the hamburger menu to streamline the UI.
It’s also now possible to move a single window to another activity using the titlebar context menu, as well as to open the full desktop context menu from the global Edit Mode toolbar while in Touch Mode with a touch device.
KDE Plasma 5.27 is the last release in the Plasma 5 series as the KDE Project will now focus its efforts on the KDE Plasma 6 series, which should be available later this year. The good news is that KDE Plasma 5.27 is an LTS (Long-Term Support) release that will receive updates for a couple of years.
The KDE Plasma 5.27 update should land in the stable software repositories of various popular GNU/Linux distributions, such as KDE neon, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Arch Linux, or Kubuntu, in the coming days.
Last updated 1 year ago
