As expected, and for those who do not know, KDE releases new versions of Plasma following a Fibonacci series (1, 1, 2, 3 and 5 weeks after the zero point version), the project made official official Tuesday the launch of plasma 5.25.4. It is the fourth maintenance update in this series, and according to some of the community and those responsible for some distributions, it is missing, since 5.25 seems to have come out a bit “buggy”.
Nate Graham, a key player in everything related to KDE, has been advancing many changes over the weekends that would arrive with Plasma 5.25.4, and they are not few if we take into account the point where we are. This would give reason to what he is doing, for example, Manjaro, who is delaying the arrival of Plasma 5.25 to its Stable branch, but there are also users, including myself, who have tried the not-so-new-anymore version and have not experienced such gross failures as to have to wait so long.
Some new features of Plasma 5.25.4
- Quite a few Plasma widgets have gained improved accessibility features, after using them with a screen reader.
- In the Plasma Wayland session:
- The cursor no longer sometimes becomes invisible when using certain very broken legacy graphics drivers.
- Fixed a way where KWin could crash when physical buttons were pressed on a connected drawing tablet.
- The cursor launch feedback animation that plays when launching an XWayland app now stops playing once the app has been launched.
- Switching virtual desktops with a touchpad swipe gesture can no longer sometimes cause WINE or Steam Proton apps and games to crash.
- The "Add Rule" sheet on the Firewall page of System Preferences is now fully readable and looks better.
- You can navigate between windows and desktops again using the keyboard in the Desktop Grid effect.
- In the Plasma X11 session, the “Window shade” function works again.
- Fixed the final way menu titles could be cut off when a long menu title was paired with short menu items.
- In the Colors page of System Preferences, color scheme previews are now 100% accurate and truly reflect your colors.
- Hot-plugged mice no longer lose their settings when the system wakes up or undocks.
- Fixed a recent regression in Activities support that was causing strange issues when switching between Activities.
- Discover no longer mislabels various apps and add-ons as having proprietary licenses when they don't.
- Dragging a window over other windows in Overview or Present Windows no longer activates their highlight effects and no longer causes the dragged window to appear awkwardly below them.
- You can now drag apps from the Kickoff search results to an empty area of Task Manager to pin them there.
- Fixed a case where Discover could crash on exit after successful updates.
- When the main Discover window is closed while it is in the middle of installing updates, the notification that appears in its place now shows an accurate count of items that remain to be updated.
Plasma 5.25.4 was announced on day 2, which means that your code is already available. The new packages are already in the KDE Backports repository (for distributions based on Debian/Ubuntu), and the same is true for KDE neon, the system they control the most because it is not under the umbrella of Canonical. As for when it will come to other distributions, it will depend on your philosophy. The aforementioned Manjaro could still wait until the fifth point update, but his "father" won't wait that long and should already be available..