KDE Plasma 5.22 – Wayland users are going to be pleased
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Today, we’re going to take a look at Plasma 5.22, the next release of KDE Plasma. There are no groundbreaking changes here, as expected, since Plasma 5.21 released about 3 months ago, and it mostly focuses on improving support for Wayland, but there are some nice quality of life imporvements in here as well.
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## Quality of life improvements
In the plasma desktop itself, you’ll find many smaller improvements. The first one is the adaptive transparency for panels and their widgets. This feature will let you have panel transparency when you just have open windows floating around, and have them turn opaque when you have a maximised window.
The new Menu introduced in Plasma 5.21 took ages for it to move to another application category when you hovered over it. This annoying delay is now gone, and it makes the menu a lot more responsive and a lot nicer to use.
In the digitalclock, you can now choose to display the date next to the time at all times, instead of having it displayed under it if the panel was big enough.
The audio applet lets you select a profile for each of your audio peripherals, right from the applet, instead of having to dig into the settings.
Users of Klipper, the clipboard manager, will now be able to press Meta+V to get the clipboard history displayed at the current mouse cursor’s location.
You can now change the text size in sticky note widgets.
In the task manager, when you hover over an app’s icon, you get a thumbnail of that app and the highlight will only happen when you hover over the thumbnail itself. This behaviour is also the default.
In the notifications area, notifications about files will now show which app will be used when you click the “open” button.
When downloads initiated from a webbrowser are waiting for an action from you to resume or really start the download, the notification will also let you know.
Finally, when you’re broadcasting or sharing your screen, do not disturb mode will automatically enable itself.
Krunner can now display multiple lines of text for search results.
Krunner also won’t display duplicate results from different runners.
In terms of applications, Plasma 5.21 introduced a new System monitor, well, it’s now the default and replaces KSysguard.
In the system settings, the first page you’ll see is a “quick settings” page, that shows some of the most frequently accessed settings, namely switching from a light theme to a dark theme, changing the animation speed, the wallpaper, or the single click/dual click behavior in the file manager.
Plasma introduced offline updates in the previous release, and in Plasma 5.22, you can now enable or disable that behavior, so everyone can have their cake and eat it too. At least on distros that support that feature.
Just a quick note: on KDE neon, you can still update manually in place, without a reboot, if you’re using the command line, only updating through discover triggered that “reboot to update” behavior.
## Wayland
First, the Plasma Activities are now supported on Wayland. THis is a feature I haven’t really used yet on my KDE Desktop. Think of them as groups of virtual desktops: each activity has their own virtual desktops, widgets, and wallpapers.
Exclusively on Wayland, when you’re using the global menu applet, you’ll see a “search” item on the right side of the menu, that lets you search through all items in the app’s menu.This is something you could do in the Unity desktop, or on MacOS, and it’s a really fantastic feature, taht I wish would come to X.org as well.
Kwin also has received a huge update to better support the wayland protocol. First, performance is improved on non-Nvidia GPUs for fullscreen windows.
Plasma also supports variable refresh rates and freesync screens when using wayland, and you can also hot plug GPUs, and Kwin will adapt automatically.
Vertical and horizontal maximization, when you drag a window to the edges of the screen should now work correctly as well, and you’re now able to use the “Present Windows” effect more reliably, to get an exposé-like view.
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