First of all, congratulations to KDE on its 23rd anniversary! October 14, 1996 started the project that gave life to this wonderful graphical desktop environment.
And today, on October 15, a new version of KDE Plasma was released - the next stage in a systematic evolutionary development aimed at functional power and user convenience. This time, the developers have prepared hundreds of major and minor changes for us, the most notable of which are described below.
Plasmashell
- Do Not Disturb mode, which turns off notifications, is automatically activated when you choose to mirror the first monitor to the second, which is typical for presentations.
- Notification Widget shows vibrating bell icon instead of the unnerving number of unread notifications.
- The widget positioning mechanism has been seriously improved, their movement and placement have become more accurate and sharp, especially on touch screens.
- Middle-clicking the app button in the taskbar opens a new instance of the app, and middle-clicking the app thumbnail closes it.
- Light RGB hinting is used by default to render fonts.
- Launching the Plasmashell shell is significantly faster! This is the result of a number of optimizations: unnecessary multiple operations have been removed, the subsystem for starting and stopping processes has been redesigned, fewer external programs are called when the environment starts, KRunner and all used icons are loaded not when Plasma starts, but as needed. Started replacing startkde shell script with C++ binaries.
- Slideshow lovers on the desktop can set their own wallpaper change order (previously there was only a random order).
- Wallpaper can be automatically pulled from the "Picture of the Day" section of Unsplash or individual categories.
- The maximum system-wide sound level can be set below 100%, in addition to the long-standing ability to set it above 100%.
- Pasting text into the Sticky Notes widget discards formatting by default.
- The recent files section of the main menu works fully with GTK/Gnome applications.
- Fixed bugs in displaying the main menu in combination with vertical panels.
- Pop-up notifications are placed more harmoniously in the corner of the screen. If the user works with the tray - for example, adjusts something in it - the display of new notifications is delayed until the dialog boxes are closed so as not to overlap them.
- Notifications that you have hovered over and/or clicked on are considered read and are not included in the unread history.
- You can switch audio playback and recording devices with a single button in the audio control widget.
- The network widget writes about connection problems in a tooltip.
- Desktop icon labels got shadows for better visibility. If the icons are large, then the add and open emblems are also drawn large.
- KRunner has learned to translate into each other fractional units.
- Cleaned out obsolete libraries, including kdelibs4support.
System settings
- Appeared Thunderbolt device configuration module.
- The interface for screen settings, power supply, rooms, boot screen, desktop effects and a number of other modules has been redesigned according to Kirigami rules. Fixed bugs when displaying on HiDPI screens.
- The ability to control the mouse cursor using the keyboard has been restored for the libinput subsystem.
- You can apply custom settings for the style, colors, fonts, Plasma icons to the SDDM session manager.
- New power option: standby mode for N hours followed by hibernation.
- Fixed the function of automatically switching streams to a new output device.
- Part of the system settings has been moved to the "Administration" section. Some options have been moved from one module to another.
- The battery consumption graph displays units of time on the x-axis.
Breeze look and feel
- Resolved issues with color schemes in Breeze GTK.
- Window borders are disabled by default.
- The appearance of tabs in Chromium and Opera comply with Breeze standards.
- Fixed issues with resizing the CSD windows of GTK applications.
- Fixed bugs in indicating active buttons in GTK programs.
- Minor cosmetic changes to various UI elements.
KSysGuard system monitor
- Added cgroup mapping column, which contains the process, and detailed information about it.
- Another new column is network traffic statistics for each process.
- Collection of statistics from NVIDIA graphics cards/processors.
- Display information about SELinux and AppArmor contexts.
- Fixed bugs in working on HiDPI screens.
Discover Package Manager
- More tasks are accompanied by an indication. Progress indicators for updating, downloading, installing packages show more accurate information.
- Improved detection of network connection problems.
- The sidebar sections and Snap apps have been given appropriate icons.
- The notification mechanism has been moved to a separate process, there is no longer any need to keep a full-fledged Discover in RAM.
- The update notification is now permanent, but has a low priority.
- It is no longer prompted to undo ongoing operations that cannot actually be undone.
- A number of interface improvements - in particular, package descriptions and feedback pages have been corrected, keyboard control has been expanded.
KWin window manager
- Support for HiDPI screens has been improved, in particular, the correct rendering of some dialog boxes has been ensured.
- On Wayland, you can set fractional scaling factors (for example, 1.2) to select a convenient size for interface objects on HiDPI screens.
- More improvements for Wayland: mouse scrolling issues fixed, linear filter used for scaling, window size and placement rules can be set, zwp_linux_dmabuf support, etc.
- Ported to X11 night mode function, also complete transfer to XCB.
- You can set preferences for individual screens in multi-monitor configurations.
- The ability to close windows with the middle mouse button has returned to the "Present Windows" effect.
- For QtQuick windows, VSync is forcibly disabled, because this function is meaningless for QtQuick and only leads to problems like UI freezes.
- A deep overhaul of the DRM subsystem has begun, especially in the area of ββX11/Wayland/Fbdev device management.
- The context menu of the window title is unified with the context menu of the application button on the taskbar.
Other changes
- The libkscreen screen management library has received a number of improvements and code cleanups.
- Fixed problems with authorization using smart cards.
- You can turn off the display from the lock screen.
- A number of fixes for the Oxygen theme: HiDPI support, solving problems with color schemes, code cleaning.
- The Plasma Browser Integration Plugin received support for dark themes, fixes to MPRIS, enhanced default playback controls, and the ability to send images, video, and audio from browsers via KDE Connect.
- The interface for interacting with WiFi networks has been redesigned in the Plasma Networkmanager widget.
Video presentation of Plasma 5.17
Sources:
Full English-language list of changes
And some more great news: the Russian localization team has achieved a complete translation of all the inscriptions of the KDE Plasma components into Russian!
Also available official Russian-language announcement of KDE Plasma 5.17 from the KDE Russia community.
Source: linux.org.ru