The beta version of the Plasma 5.26 custom shell is available for testing. You can test the new release through a live build from the openSUSE project and a build from the KDE Neon Testing edition project. Packages for various distributions can be found on this page. The release is expected on October 11th.
Key improvements:
- The Plasma Bigscreen environment is proposed, specially optimized for large TV screens and control without a keyboard using remote controls and a voice assistant. The voice assistant is based on the developments of the Mycroft project and uses the Selene voice interface for control, and the Google STT or Mozilla DeepSpeech engine for speech recognition. In addition to KDE programs, Mycroft multimedia applications are also supported. The environment can be used to equip set-top boxes and smart TVs.
The composition also includes several components developed by the Bigscreen project:
- To control via remotes, the Plasma Remotecontrollers set is used, which translates events of specialized input devices into keyboard and mouse events. It supports both the use of conventional television infrared remotes (support is implemented using the libCEC library), as well as game consoles with a Bluetooth interface, such as the Nintendo Wiimote and Wii Plus.
- To navigate the global network, the Aura web browser based on the Chromium engine is used. The browser offers a simple interface optimized for navigating websites using the TV remote. There is support for tabs, bookmarks and browsing history.
- To listen to music and watch videos, the Plank Player multimedia player is being developed, which allows you to play files from a local file system.
- The KPipewire component has been added to allow you to use the Flatpak package with the PipeWire media server in Plasma.
- In the Program Control Center (Discover), the display of content ratings for applications has been implemented and a "Share" button has been added to transfer information about the application. Provided the ability to configure the frequency of notifications about the availability of updates. When submitting a review, you are allowed to choose a different username.
- The size of widgets (plasmoids) on the panel can now be changed by analogy with ordinary windows by stretching over the edge or corner. The changed size is remembered. Many plasmoids have improved support for people with disabilities.
- The Kickoff application menu has a new compact mode ("Compact", not used by default), which allows you to display more menu items at the same time. When placing the menu in a horizontal panel, it is possible to display only text without icons. In the general list of all applications, added support for filtering applications by the first letter of the name.
- In the configurator, the desktop wallpaper preview is simplified (clicking on the wallpaper in the list now leads to their temporary display instead of the current wallpaper). Added support for wallpapers with different images for dark and light color schemes, as well as the ability to apply animated images to wallpapers and show a series of images in the form of a slideshow.
- The number of applets that support keyboard navigation has been expanded.
- When you start typing in overview mode, the entered text is used as a mask for window filtering.
- Added the ability to redefine buttons for multi-button mice.
- Continued improvement of the session based on the Wayland protocol. Implemented the ability to disable pasting from clipboards with the middle mouse button and set the mapping of the graphics tablet input area to screen coordinates. To avoid blurring, the choice is given whether to scale the application using the composite manager or the application itself.
Source: opennet.ru