Recently the release of the beta version of what will be the next version of the popular desktop environment KDE Plasma 5.20 y of the most important changes that were released, highlights the improvements for the support of Wayland, the way of presentation of the windows and much more.
For those who are interested in being able to test the beta from KDE, you can download live builds from openSUSE or KDE Neon Testing, in addition to the release of the stable version is expected on October 13.
KDE Plasma 5.20 beta highlights
Support for Wayland has been improved enormously, since a session based on Wayland has been brought to parity in functionality with an execution on X11, in addition to that fixed issues with screen casting.
Added the ability to paste with the middle mouse button (so far only in KDE applications, does not work in GTK) and Fixed XWayland stability issues.
By default, an alternate taskbar layout is enabled, which is displayed at the bottom of the screen and provides navigation through open windows and running applications. Instead of the traditional buttons with the name of the program, now only square icons are displayed.
The panel also includes by default grouping by application, in which all the windows of an application are represented by a single drop-down button.
For panel buttons, clicking on the one that pops up an additional menu now displays an arrow-shaped indicator.
In addition, it is also highlighted that on-screen indicators (OSD) were reworked and are less intrusive that appear when you change the brightness or volume.
As well added an option to task manager to disable minimization of active task windows by clicking. Clicking on grouped items in the task manager now cycles through each task by default.
Keyboard shortcut for moving windows changed and resize it: instead of dragging with the mouse while holding the Alt key, the Meta key is now used to avoid a conflict with a similar combination used in applications.
Some laptops have the option of setting the battery limit below 100% to extend battery life.
Added the ability to dock windows in the corners in mosaic mode combining the docking keys on the left, right, top and bottom edges. For example, pressing Meta + Up Arrow and then Left Arrow will snap the window to the upper left corner.
A warning about exhaustion of free space on system partition, even if the home directory is on another partition.
Of the other changes that were implemented:
- Added a setting to allow KRunner to use floating windows that are not docked on top.
- KRunner also implements memorization of the previously entered search phrase and adds support for searching open web pages in the Falkon browser.
- Minimized windows are now placed at the bottom of the task list in the Alt + Tab task switching interface.
- Filtering of unused audio devices is enabled by default on the Sound Settings and Sound Control Applet page.
- The 'Device Notifier' applet has been renamed to 'Disks & Devices' and has been expanded to provide information about all drives, not just external ones.
- To switch to do not disturb mode, you can now use the middle click on the notification applet.
- Added a setting to change the zoom level in the browser control widget.
- In the configurator, highlighting of changed values is implemented, allowing you to clearly see which of the settings differs from the default values.
- Added display of warnings about failures and events to track the status of disks received through the SMART mechanism
- Completely redesigned and equipped with a modern page interface with settings for autorun, Bluetooth and user management.
- The sound settings now have an option to change the balance, allowing the volume to be adjusted separately for each audio channel.