Today is an important day for KDE users. If not important, at least interesting, since the project has launched plasma 5.26, and it is not an update anymore. This version has come with new features, but Nate Graham, a key player in the team who publishes weekly articles about the new features they are working on, also said that they were going to slow down a bit to focus on stability and reliability. Therefore, what is important or interesting today is, first, that there is a new Plasma, and, second, that everything will work better with it.
During the last weeks the progress has not stopped completely, but they have been at least since the launch of the beta Plasma 5.26 trying fix as many bugs as possible. These fixes don't make headlines, but they do make using the entire desktop better. They have three bug lists: the 15-minute one (bugs that appear early and give the project a bad name), the important ones and the general list, and in all three cases more than usual have been eliminated.
Plasma 5.26 Highlights
- Animated wallpapers.
- Improvements to Plasma Bigscreen, including a new web browser, Aura, and a player, Plank Player.
- Ability to resize the bottom panel widgets.
- New countdown widget that will appear on the screen.
- New control center, a widget that can be added to the system tray.
- Ability to change the font size of the digital clock, and set the volume step in the volume controller.
- Ability to remove icon from app launcher/main menu/home widget and make it use text instead… Or make it use both.
- In Kickoff, the All Apps section can now be easily navigated using an alphabetized index.
- Full list of changes, here.
plasma 5.26 has been announced moments ago, and that means your code It is now available for developers to work with. In the next few hours it will appear, or should, in KDE neon, and probably also in the KDE Backports repository. Later it will do so for distributions whose development model will be Rolling Release. The rest of the operating systems will be arriving in a time frame that will depend on their philosophy.