Ya KDE Plasma 5.17 beta version released to the general public with which enthusiastic users will be able to carry out the pertinent tests and be able to support in the detection of errors. This new beta of KDE Plasma 5.17 brings various improvements among which the changes for various components stand out of the environment, as well as the improvements to these and especially the solution of errors.
One of the most notable changes is in the KWin window manager which has improved support for high pixel density displays (HiDPI) and has added fractional scaling support for Wayland-based Plasma desktop sessions.
This feature allows you to choose the optimal size of the elements on screens with a high pixel density, for example, you can increase the displayed interface elements not 2 times, but 1.5 times.
The Breeze GTK theme has been updated to improve the display of the Chromium Chrome interface in the KDE environment (for example, active and inactive tabs are now visually different). The color scheme applies to GTK and GNOME applications. Using Wayland, it became possible to resize the GTK header panels in relation to the window borders.
The interface has been updated to adjust the night lighting, which is now available when working on X11.
Correct scrolling with the mouse wheel is also provided in KWin in a Wayland-based environment.
While for X11, the ability to use the Meta key as a modifier to switch windows has been added (instead of Alt + Tab), as well as an option that restricts the use of display settings only to the current location of the display in multi-monitor setups.
In the "Present Windows" effect, support for closing windows with a middle mouse click has been added.
Another change for this beta of Plasma 5.17 is that the interface of the screen configurators was modified, power consumption, homescreen saver, desktop effects, screen lock, touchscreens, windows, advanced SDDM settings, and triggering actions when hovering over the corners of the screen .
Settings for login page layout (SDDM) are expanded, for which you can now specify your own font, color scheme, icon set, and other settings.
A two-stage sleep mode has been added, in which the system first goes into standby mode and after a few hours into sleep mode.
In the case of Discover se They have implemented the correct indicators of the progress of the operations. Improved reporting of errors due to network connectivity issues.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- In the system configuration section, the basic information about the system is displayed
- For people with disabilities, added the ability to move the cursor using the keyboard
- Added ability to change color scheme for headings on color settings page
- Added the ability to assign a global hotkey to turn off the screen.
- Added icons in the sidebar and icons for instant apps.
- In sticky notes, by default, text formatting elements are cleared when pasting from clipboard
- In Kickoff, in the recently opened documents section, viewing of open documents in Gnome / GTK applications is also provided
- Added a section to configure devices with Thunderbolt interface to the configurator
Finally for those who are interested in trying this beta version they can test the new version via Live build from openSUSE project and builds from the edit project KDE Neon Testing.
Packages for various distributions can be found on this page. The launch is expected on October 15.