On September 19, 2019, the beta version of the KDE Plasma 5.17 desktop environment was released. According to the developers, many improvements and features have been added to the new version, making this desktop environment even lighter and more functional.
Release features:
- System settings got new options to control Thunderbolt hardware, night mode added, many pages redesigned to make it easier to set up
- Improved notifications, added a new do-not-disturb mode designed for presentations
- Improved Breeze GTK theme for Chrome/Chromium browsers
- The KWin window manager received many improvements, including those related to HiDPI and multi-screen operation, and added support for fractional scaling for Wayland
The full release of version 5.17 will take place in mid-October.
The release of Plasma 5.17 is dedicated to one of the KDE developers, Guillermo Amaral. Guillermo was a passionate KDE developer, describing himself as "an incredibly handsome self-taught multidisciplinary engineer". He lost the fight against cancer last summer, but everyone who worked with him will remember him as a good friend and smart developer.
More about innovations:
plasma:
- Do Not Disturb mode is automatically enabled when mirroring screens (for example, during a presentation)
- The notification widget now uses an improved icon instead of showing the number of unread notifications
- Improved positioning of UX widgets, especially for touch screens
- Improved middle click behavior in Task Manager: clicking on the thumbnail closes the process, and clicking on the task itself starts a new instance
- Light RGB hinting is now the default font rendering mode
- Plasma now launches faster (according to the developers)
- Converting fractional units to others in Krunner and Kickoff (Picture)
- The slideshow in the desktop wallpaper selection can now be in a user-specified order, not just random (Picture)
- Added the ability to set the maximum volume level lower than 100%
System parameters:
- Added "night mode" feature for X11 (Picture)
- Added accessibility options for moving the cursor with the keyboard (using Libinput)
- It is now possible for SDDM to accept custom fonts, color settings and themes so that the login screen does not differ from the main design of the desktop environment
- Added new feature "Sleep for a few hours and then hibernate"
- Now you can assign a global keyboard shortcut to turn off the screen
system monitor:
- Added the ability to view network usage statistics for each process
- Added the ability to view NVidia GPU statistics
Kwin:
- Added fractional scaling for Wayland
- Improved HiDPI and multi-screen support
- Mousewheel scrolling on Wayland now always scrolls the specified number of lines
You can download live images here
Source: linux.org.ru