Release AnnouncementsPlasma 5.16.90

Also available in:



English | Català | Español | Italiano | Nederlands | Português | Українська





KDE Plasma 5.17 Beta

Thursday, 19 September 2019.

Today KDE launches the beta release of Plasma 5.17.

We've added a bunch of new features and improvements to KDE's lightweight yet full featured desktop environment.

Plasma's updated web page gives more background on why you should use it on your computer.

Guillermo Amaral

System Settings has gained new features to help you manage your fancy Thunderbolt hardware, plus Night Color is now on X11 and a bunch of pages got redesigned to help you get your configuration done easier. Our notifications continue to improve with a new icon and automatic do-not-disturb mode for presentations. Our Breeze GTK theme now provides a better appearance for the Chromium/Chrome web browsers and applies your color scheme to GTK and GNOME apps. The window manager KWin has received many HiDPI and multi-screen improvements, and now supports fractional scaling on Wayland.

You can test the Plasma 5.17 beta for the next three weeks until the final release in mid-October. Give it a whirl with your favorite distribution!

The Plasma 5.17 series is dedicated to our friend Guillermo Amaral. Guillermo was an enthusiastic KDE developer who rightly self described as 'an incredibly handsome multidisciplinary self-taught engineer'. He brought cheer to anyone he met. He lost his battle with cancer last summer but will be remembered as a friend to all he met.

Plasma

Unsplash Pic of the Day

KRunner now converts fractional units

Improved Notifications widget and widget editing UX

Do Not Disturb mode is automatically enabled when mirroring screens (e.g. when delivering a presentation)

The Notifications widget now uses an improved icon instead of displaying the number of unread notifications

Improved widget positioning UX, particularly for touch

Improved the Task Manager's middle-click behavior: middle-clicking on an open app's task opens a new instance, while middle-clicking on its thumbnail will close that instance

Slight RGB hinting is now the default font rendering mode

Plasma now starts even faster!

Conversion of fractional units into other units (e.g. 3/16" == 4.76 mm) in KRunner and Kickoff

Wallpaper slideshows can now have user-chosen ordering rather than always being random

New Unsplash picture of the day wallpaper source with categories

Much better support for public WiFi login

Added the ability to set a maximum volume that's lower than 100%

Pasting text into a sticky note strips the formatting by default

Kickoff's recent documents section now works with GNOME/GTK apps

Fixed Kickoff tab appearance being broken with vertical panels

System Settings: Thunderbolt, X11 Night Color and Overhauled Interfaces

Night Color settings are now available on X11 too

Thunderbolt device management

Reorganized Appearance settings, consistent sidebars and headers

New settings panel for managing and configuring Thunderbolt devices

The Night Color settings are now available on X11 too. It gets a modernized and redesigned user interface, and the feature can be manually invoked in the settings or with a keyboard shortcut.

Overhauled the user interface for the Displays, Energy, Activities, Boot Splash, Desktop Effects, Screen Locking, Screen Edges, Touch Screen, and Window Behavior settings pages and the SDDM advanced settings tab

Reorganized and renamed some settings pages in the Appearance section

Basic system information is now available through System Settings

Added accessibility feature to move your cursor with the keyboard when using Libinput

You can now apply a user's font, color scheme, icon theme, and other settings to the SDDM login screen to ensure visual continuity on single-user systems

New 'sleep for a few hours and then hibernate' feature

The Colors page now displays the color scheme's titlebar colors

It is now possible to assign a global keyboard shortcut to turn off the screen

Standardized appearance for list headers

The 'Automatically switch all running streams when a new output becomes available' feature now works properly

Breeze Theme

Window borders are now turned off by default

The Breeze GTK theme now respects your chosen color scheme

Active and inactive tabs in Google Chrome and Chromium now look visually distinct

Window borders are now turned off by default

Sidebars in settings windows now have a consistent modernized appearance

System Monitor

CGroups in System Monitor

System Monitor can now show CGroup details to look at container limits

Each process can now report its network usage statistics

It is now possible to see NVidia GPU stats

Discover

Discover now has icons on the sidebar

Real progress bars and spinners in various parts of the UI to better communicate progress information

Better 'No connection' error messages

Icons in the sidebar and icons for Snap apps

KWin: Improved Display Management

Fractional scaling added on Wayland

It is now once again possible to close windows in the Present Windows effect with a middle-click

Option to configure whether screen settings apply only for the current screen arrangement or to all screen arrangements

Many multi-screen and HiDPI improvements

On Wayland, it is now possible to resize GTK headerbar windows from window edges

Scrolling with a wheel mouse on Wayland now always scrolls the correct number of lines

On X11, it is now possible to use the Meta key as a modifier for the window switcher that's bound to Alt+Tab by default

Feedback Discuss Plasma 5 on the KDE Forums Plasma 5 board. You can provide feedback direct to the developers via the Plasma Matrix chat room, Plasma-devel mailing list or report issues via bugzilla. If you like what the team is doing, please let them know! Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Supporting KDE

KDE is a Free Software community that exists and grows only because of the help of many volunteers that donate their time and effort. KDE is always looking for new volunteers and contributions, whether it is help with coding, bug fixing or reporting, writing documentation, translations, promotion, money, etc. All contributions are gratefully appreciated and eagerly accepted. Please read through the Supporting KDE page for further information or become a KDE e.V. supporting member through our Join the Game initiative.

About KDE

KDE is an international technology team that creates free and open source software for desktop and portable computing. Among KDE's products are a modern desktop system for Linux and UNIX platforms, comprehensive office productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of software titles in many categories including Internet and web applications, multimedia, entertainment, educational, graphics and software development. KDE software is translated into more than 60 languages and is built with ease of use and modern accessibility principles in mind. KDE's full-featured applications run natively on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows and macOS.

Trademark Notices. KDE® and the K Desktop Environment® logo are registered trademarks of KDE e.V. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks and copyrights referred to in this announcement are the property of their respective owners.

Press Contacts

For more information send us an email:

press@kde.org