Release 5.16 is remarkable in that it contains not only minor improvements and interface polish that have already become familiar, but also major changes in various Plasma components. It was decided to mark this fact new boring wallpapersselected by members of the KDE Visual Design Group in an open competition.
Major innovations in Plasma 5.16
- The notification system has been completely redesigned. Now notifications can be turned off temporarily by ticking "Do Not Disturb". Important notifications can be displayed through full-screen applications and despite the Do Not Disturb mode (the level of importance is set in the settings). Improved notification history design. Ensured correct display of notifications on multiple monitors and/or a vertical panel. Fixed memory leaks.
- The KWin window manager began supporting EGL Streams to run Wayland on Nvidia's proprietary driver. The patches are written by an engineer that Nvidia specifically hired for this purpose. You can activate support through the environment variable KWIN_DRM_USE_EGL_STREAMS=1
- Started implementation of remote desktop for Wayland. The mechanism uses PipeWire and xdg-desktop-portal. Of the input devices, only the mouse is currently supported, full functionality is expected in Plasma 5.17.
- In combination with a test version of the Qt 5.13 framework, a long-standing problem is solved - image corruption after waking the system from hibernation with the nvidia video driver. Plasma 5.16 requires Qt 5.12 or later to run and run.
- Redesigned the Breeze styling for the session manager, lock screen, and logout screen to make them more generic. The design of the Plasma widget settings has also been redesigned and unified. The overall design of the shell has become closer to Kirigami standards.
Other changes to the desktop shell
- Issues with applying Plasma themes to panels have been fixed, and new design options have been added such as shifting the clock hands and blurring the background.
- The on-screen color picker widget has been improved, now it can pass color parameters directly to text and image editors.
- The kuiserver component was completely dropped from Plasma, because it was an unnecessary intermediary in transmitting notifications about the operation of processes (in combination with programs like Latte Dock, this can cause problems). A number of cleanups of the codebase have been done.
- The system tray began to show a microphone icon if the system is recording sound. Through it, the mouse can change the volume level and turn off the sound. In tablet mode, the tray magnifies all icons.
- The default panel displays the Show Desktop widget button. The widget's behavior can be switched to Minimize All Windows.
- The desktop wallpaper slideshow settings module has learned how to show individual files and select them to participate in the slideshow.
- The KSysGuard System Monitor has received a redesigned context menu. An open copy of the utility can be moved from any desktop to the current one by clicking the mouse wheel.
- Window and menu shadows in the Breeze theme are now darker and more distinct.
- In panel customization mode, any widgets can show an "Interchangeable Widgets" button to quickly select an alternative.
- Through PulseAudio, you can turn off any sound notifications. The volume control widget has learned to transfer all sound streams to the selected device.
- A button to unmount all devices has appeared in the plug-in drives widget.
- The folder view widget adjusts the size of items to the width of the widget and allows you to manually adjust the width of the items.
- Touchpad customization via libinput became available when running on X11.
- The session manager can reboot the computer directly into the UEFI settings. In this case, the logout screen displays a warning.
- Fixed an issue with losing focus on the session lock screen.
What's new in the settings subsystem
- The system parameters interface has been improved according to the Kirigami standards. The section for designing applications has been moved to the first place in the list.
- Sections of color schemes and window title themes received a unified design in the form of a grid.
- Color schemes can be filtered by light/dark criteria, set by drag and drop, and undo them.
- The network configuration module prevents the use of incorrect passwords such as words shorter than 8 characters for WPA-PSK Wi-Fi.
- Significantly improved theme preview for the SDDM session manager.
- Fixed issues with applying color schemes to GTK applications.
- The screen customization module now calculates the scaling factor dynamically.
- The subsystem has been cleared of obsolete code and unused files.
List of changes in the KWin window manager
- Full drag'n'drop support between Wayland and XWayland apps.
- For touchpads on Wayland, you can choose how the click is handled.
- KWin now strictly monitors the flushing of the stream buffer upon completion of effects. The blur effect has been corrected for a more natural look.
- Improved handling of rotated screens. The tablet mode began to be detected automatically.
- On the Nvidia proprietary driver, the glXSwapBuffers mechanism for X11 is automatically blocked, due to which performance suffers.
- Support for swap buffers has been implemented for the EGL GBM backend.
- Fixed a crash when deleting the current desktop with a script.
- The codebase has been cleared of obsolete and unused sections.
What else is in Plasma 5.16
- The network widget updates the list of Wi-Fi networks much faster. You can set criteria for searching networks. By right-clicking, the network settings are expanded.
- The WireGuard configurator supports all features of NetworkManager 1.16.
- The Openconnect VPN configuration plugin has received support for OTP one-time passwords and the GlobalProtect protocol.
- The Discover package manager began to separately show the stages of downloading and installing a package. Improved informativeness of progress bars, added indication of checking for updates. Provided the ability to exit the program while working with packages.
- Discover has also improved its ability to work with applications from store.kde.org, including those in the AppImage format. Fixed handling of Flatpak updates.
- You can now connect and disconnect Plasma Vault encrypted storages through the Dolphin file manager, just like regular drives.
- The main menu editing utility has got a filter and search mechanism.
- When muting the sound with the Mute key on the keyboard, sound notifications are no longer played.
Additional sources:
Source: linux.org.ru