Recently a beta version of the Plasma 5.15 custom shell was made available to the public, built with the KDE Frameworks 5 platform and the Qt 5 library with OpenGL / OpenGL ES to speed up rendering.
They can test the new version via live compilation from the openSUSE project and the KDE Neon project compilation, although additionally there are also packages for various distributions, they can be found on the official website of the project.
Main new features in KDE Plasma 5.15 Enhancements
Within of the main changes that can be highlighted in what will be this new branch from the KDE desktop environment, Find the new battery charge monitoring widget.
This new Widget is implemented to display the battery status of external Bluetooth devices (the function is functional only when new versions of upower and bluez are installed).
Visual enhancements
On the other hand, the dialog for customizing desktop wallpaper has built-in functions for downloading and installing new plugins with the implementation of dynamic wallpaper.
Better readability of file names under desktop icons- Sufficient horizontal space is provided for text, regardless of the size of the pictogram, and adequate contrast is provided necessary for easy reading of text displayed on very light or intricate wallpapers.
For blind users, support for collecting icons through screen readers has been added.
In the Notes widget (Notes), a new theme appears, displaying clear text on a transparent background.
Added the ability to enable cyclical scrolling when reaching the end of the virtual desktop list.
The appearance of pop-up alerts from the notification system has been improved.
The usability in the program search interface (KRunner) has also been improved, since the correct handling of duplicates was implemented in the output.
Firefox bookmarks duplicates and duplicate items are now not displayed when a found file is divided into multiple categories.
The appearance of the separate search widget is in accordance with the KRunner design.
The widget for notification of new media connection now correctly handles attempts to perform dangerous operations for the system.
Interface to configure the system
SThe design was modified and the code for the virtual desktop configurator was rewritten. The new implementation works fine in Wayland-based environments, is more convenient to use, and visually corresponds to the rest of the KDE configurators.
Unified layout of the folder view shell and clock settings, which is summarized in common with the other configurators.
Work was done on unifying icons, scripts and buttons on different pages of the Interface to configure the system.
On the "Stationery" page in the configurator, third-party stationery, installed via the store.kde.org catalog, is now displayed.
The desktop effects configurator implementation has been translated to use QtQuickControls 2.
In the interface to configure the display parameters, the native display resolution is now marked with an asterisk.
Improved page layout to customize the login screen and thumbnail for the updated appearance of the default Breeze theme.
GTK and GNOME integration
Firefox 64 introduces support for using the native KDE dialogs to open and save files. To enable this feature, you must install the xdg-desktop-portal and xdg-desktop-portal-kde packages, and then start Firefox with the environment variable GTK_USE_PORTAL = 1.
The xdg-desktop-portal-kde and plasma-Integration integration modules have added portal support to access settings, allowing you to access Plasma configuration parameters (fonts, icons, widget themes, and color schemes) from isolated Flatpak and Snap applications.
The global scale factor for high pixel density (high DPI) displays is now taken into account for the output of GTK and GNOME applications.