In early February, KDE He launched an LTS version of its graphical environment with many changes that is already available in operating systems like Kubuntu 20.04 LTS. In three weeks they will launch another new major version that we can already test, a Plasma 5.19 beta that right now available such as Plasma 5.18.90. Although it comes with many changes, most of them are designed to make the graphical environment look and work better.
As an example, we have a new feature in Discover that now makes it easier for us to delete Flatpak repositories that are in use. As of Plasma 5.19, instead of showing an error, it will warn us that we have to remove the installed packages and will offer us an option to "Proceed" with the changes or "Cancel". Below you have the full list of news that KDE has published in its official note.
Highlights of Plasma 5.19 beta (5.18.90)
- Plasma Desktop and Widgets:
- They have improved the panel spacer so that it can automatically center the widgets.
- The system monitor widgets have been rewritten from scratch.
- Plasma now has a consistent layout and header area in systray applets, as well as notifications.
- The appearance of the media player applet in the System Tray and the Task Manager tooltip has been updated.
- There are completely new photo avatars to choose from.
- You can now see the name of the creator of a desktop background when you go to choose one.
- Sticky notes get usability improvements.
- We now have more control over the visibility of the volume OSDs during certain situations.
- GTK 3 applications immediately apply a newly selected color scheme and GTK 2 applications no longer have broken colors.
- The default fixed width font size has been increased from 9 to 10.
- The audio widget shows a more consistent appearance with a more attractive interface for changing the current audio device.
- System preferences:
- The default application pages, online accounts, global shortcuts, KWin rules, and background services have been improved.
- When launching the System Preferences modules from KRunner or the Application Launcher, the full System Prefeerencis application launches on the page you requested.
- The display settings page now shows the aspect ratio for each available screen resolution.
- We now have more granular control over the speed of Plasma animation.
- Configurable file indexing for individual directories has been added and we can now disable hidden file indexing.
- Now there is an option that allows us to configure the scrolling speed of the mouse and the touchpad in Wayland.
- Many small improvements have been made to the font settings.
- Information Center:
- The Information Center application has been redesigned with an image consistent with System Preferences.
- It is now possible to view the information about our hardware graphics.
- kwin:
- The new subfloor cutout for Wayland greatly reduces flicker in many applications.
- The icons in the title bars are now recolored to fit the color scheme rather than being difficult to see at times.
- Screen rotation for convertible tablets and laptops now works in Wayland.
- Discover:
- Flatpak repositories in use are now easier to remove.
- Now shows the version of the app for reviews.
- Its visual consistency and usability have been improved.
- KSysGuard has added support for systems with CPUs with more than 12 cores.
How to try it right now
KDE Community warns that it is a beta and could present problems, but if you want to install it now, you have to do the following.
- We write this in the terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/beta && sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y
- We restart the equipment. If we can't, we write the following in the terminal:
systemctl reboot
IMPORTANT: in case of problems, the repository will have to be removed (with ppa-purge) to reverse changes and downgrade.