The KDE project announced the update letter for its KDE Plasma 5.14.4 desktop environment, this update being quite important because in addition to including the corrections of its internal version, This release includes improvements to Flatpak and the Plasma Discover graphical package manager.
The KDE Plasma desktop is a beautiful desktop environment that takes full advantage of modern computing technology. It also stands out for its continuous updating.
KDE Plasma improves compatibility with HiDPI displays and incorporates a converged graphical command interpreter, capable of modifying its graphical interface according to the device in use.
It also includes a new default desktop theme, called Breeze. Other changes include the migration to a new, fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack centered on an OpenGL ES-based scene (canvas) graphic.
Plasma 5 completes the migration from KDE Plasma 4 to QtQuick 5.
Qt 2's QtQuick 5 uses a hardware-accelerated OpenGL ES scene graph to compose and render graphics on the screen, enabling the delegation of computationally expensive graphics rendering tasks to the GPU, freeing up processor resources. main system and is faster and more efficient.
KDE Plasma 5.14.4 Key New Features
With this new desktop environment update release vSeveral components have been updated which includes a total of 45 changes of which we will mention some of them.
About this version, its developers commented the following:
«Today KDE releases an update for KDE plasma 5, version 5.14.4.
Plasma version 5.14 was released in October with many resource refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience. this release adds new translations and corrections from the KDE contributors. Corrections are usually small, but important. «
In addition, several components of the environment received improvements, from which the following components benefited:
PlasmaDesktop
This release adds a week of new translations and fixes from KDE contributors. Bug fixes are usually small but important and include:
Fixing the global progress screen for updates as well as improving the contrast of the label against certain desktop backgrounds.
Also fixed dashboard crash issue when clicking between multi-grid categories
Discover
In Discover, a bug was fixed when deleting a category and displaying the global progress for updates.
Plasma addons
The handling of errors in the updated data and the correct use of DataEngineConsumer has been solved
Fixed widget context menu and fixed issue with date and time when matching time zones less restrictively
Additionally, keyboard navigation has been improved
Plasma Networkmanager (plasma-nm)
In Openconnect there was an error since it did not reload the authentication dialog indefinitely when the group was changed.
In VPN Plugins, the layout when using the password field was fixed, and the requests for secrets for VPN connections were fixed all the time.
On the other components that received updates to the environment we find the following: Plasma Workspace, Plasma Audio Volume Control, plasma-browser-integration, Breeze, KScreen, KWin and kactivitymanagerd.
About the next KDE update
After this fourth update release of KDE branch 5.14.x the developers have already started working on what will be the next update of their desktop environment.
The next maintenance update is planned as the fifth for the KDE Plasma 5.14 series which will be KDE Plasma 5.14.5.
So it is expected that it will be released next year, being a bit exact for January 8, 2019.
This means that KDE Plasma 5.14.5 will also mark the end of the life of the KDE Plasma 5.14 series of desktop environments. Therefore, no additional updates will be made after version 5.14.5.