The availability of the new version has been announced desktop environment KDE Plasma 5.18, which is built on the KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5 platform using OpenGL / OpenGL ES for faster rendering.
Of the significant innovations that appeared in KDE Plasma 5.18 compared to the previous version LTS 5.12, there is a complete redesign of the notification system, integration with browsers, redesign of system settings, improved support for GTK applications (using color schemes, supporting global menus, etc.), improved management of multiple monitor configurations, support for Flatpak "portals" for integration with the desktop and access to settings, night lighting mode and tools to manage devices with a Thunderbolt interface.
In KDE Plasma 5.18 correct rendering of GTK applications has been implemented that use client-side window decorations to place controls on the window's title bar. For such applications, shadow rendering was provided and the ability to use the correct window capture areas to resize without requiring thick frames was added.
Another important change is the introduction of a new global editing panel which simplifies the layout of items on the desktop and placement of widgets, as well as providing access to various desktop settings.
The new mode has replaced the previous button with the configuration tools from the desktop, which is displayed in the upper right corner of the screen. A new panel is opened via the "Customize layout" item in the context menu, which is displayed when you right-click on an empty area of the desktop.
In the Center to install applications and plugins (Discover), added ability to post nested comments when parsing plugins, the design of the title of the sidebar and the interface with the revisions has been modernized, in addition to the addition of the support to find plugins from the main page. The default keyboard focus now switches to the search bar.
Settings have been added for the level of detail of telemetry sent with information about the system and the frequency of user access to certain KDE functions. Statistics are sent anonymously and by default their sending is disabled.
A slider has been added to the configurator to select the speed of the window animation (when the slider is moved to the right, the windows will appear instantly and when it is scrolled to the left, using animation).
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- A draggable icon has been added to the notifications reporting the completion of the file upload, allowing you to quickly move the file to another location.
- Notifications are provided with a low battery warning on a connected Bluetooth device.
- The page with the systray settings has been redone.
- Improved search in the sidebar.
- Added option to scroll to the position corresponding to the place of a click on the scroll bar.
- Redesigned interface to set night backlight mode.
- A new interface is proposed to configure the design style of the application.
- Work was done to eliminate visual artifacts in applications when using fractional scaling in an X11-based environment.
- KSysGuard provides statistics for NVIDIA GPUs (memory consumption and GPU load).
You can check the full list of changes In the following link.
Get KDE Plasma 5.18
Finally, for those interested in trying this new version pThey can evaluate the work of the new version through the Live versions of the projector openSUSE and the KDE Neon User Edition project.
As for the availability of for the different Linux distributions, at the moment it is already available for Arch Linux. For the others, we will have to wait a few more hours to be able to install this new version of KDE Plasma 5.18