The new version of the popular desktop environment is already among us KDE Plasma 5.19 in which it is present a series of quite interesting improvements, as well as various updates to the components of this desktop environment.
For those who still do not know about KDE Plasma, they should know that it is a shell built using the KDE Frameworks 5 and the Qt 5 library using OpenGL / OpenGL, in addition to being an excellent option due to the great customization options offered by the environment and also having an excellent design.
What's new in KDE Plasma 5.19
In this new version of the environment, we can find that the application interface was redesigned to view information about the system, in which the ability to view information about graphic equipment was added.
In KWin a new technique was implemented clipping which solves the flickering problem in many applications.
While running wayland, also support is provided for screen rotation on tablets and laptops and transformers and the color adjustment of the glyphs in the headers is provided to align them with the active color scheme.
Another change that is presented in this new version of KDE Plasma 5.19 is in Discover which now has a unified layout with other Plasma components, simplified removal of the Flatpak repository, as well as showing the version of the application that is provided.
In addition, highlights he work that was done to unify the layout and headers of the applets in the systray, as well as the notifications displayed on the desktop, also the new set of photo avatars is available in the user settings interface.
Default, new Flow wallpapers are proposed, in which in the desktop background selection interface, you can view information about the author of the image.
We can also find that applet appearance updated to manage the media file playback located in the system tray.
The ability to apply a new color scheme to GTK3-based applications has been implemented, and issues with displaying correct colors in GTK2-based applications have been resolved.
The sections for managing default applications, online service accounts, global keyboard shortcuts, KWin scripts and background services have been redesigned in the "System Settings" configurator.
When calling the configurator modules from KRunner or from the application start menu, the complete "System Configuration" application is started by opening the desired configuration section.
And a settings page is provided in the sound control widget with a convenient interface to switch between available sound devices, similar in appearance to other widgets.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Work was done to improve the usability of sticky notes.
- The panel has improved indentation and the ability to auto-center widgets.
- In the configuration of the screen parameters, the display of the aspect ratio is implemented for each proposed screen resolution.
- Added the ability to adjust the speed of animation effects for the desktop.
- When using Wayland given the ability to adjust scrolling speed for mouse and trackpad.
- Many minor fixes and improvements have been made to the font settings interface.
- KSysGuard adds support for systems with more than 12 CPU cores
- The widgets for monitoring system parameters have been completely rewritten.
How to get KDE Plasma 5.19?
For those who are interested in being able to obtain the new packages, you can find the instructions for the different Linux distributions In the following link.
In addition, the work of the new version can be evaluated through the openSUSE Live project and the KDE Neon User Edition project.