KDE Will Make Plasma Wayland Ready for the Masses in 2021, Improve Fingerprint Support

KDE Plasma 5.20

KDE developer Nate Graham shared today KDE’s roadmap for 2021 to give us an overview of the biggest changes to expect from the Plasma desktop environment and apps throughout the year.

I think 2020 has been a great year for KDE and its ever-growing Plasma and Apps ecosystem, especially because of the launch of the PinePhone KDE Community Edition Linux smartphone, but also because of the numerous updates that the popular desktop environment and related applications received.

KDE Plasma is getting bigger, more powerful, and featureful with each new release, and 2021 looks to be an amazing year for developing one of the most used Linux desktop environments ever.

According to Nate Graham, KDE Plasma fans should expect a production-ready Plasma Wayland session in 2021 as the development team will focus their efforts on improving its usability and stability to make it available for the masses and usable on production workflows.

“I’ll be honest: before 2020 the Plasma Wayland session felt like a mess to me. Nothing worked properly,” said Nate Graham. “But all of this changed in 2020: suddenly things started working properly. I expect the trend of serious, concentrated Wayland work to continue in 2021.”

Besides the Wayland work, the KDE developers will continue improving the fingerprint support throughout the entire stack to make it work in the SDDM login screen, the lock screen, KAuth, Polkit, etc., as well as to finish up the Breeze Evolution theme and replace the Kickoff application launcher, both slated for release in the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.21 desktop environment.

Kickoff redesign – Image credits: Mikel Johnson

In 2021, KDE’s Plasma and Apps will get a lot of improvements and new features, starting with Konsole’s ability to re-flow the text when you resize its window, and continuing with support for more hardware vendors and closer coordination with popular GNU/Linux distributions, as well as a more powerful KDE neon distro, so keep an eye on this place for more awesome KDE news going forward.

Image credits: KDE Project

Last updated 3 years ago

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