As programmed, and that is because KDE usually delivers its work to us with Swiss precision, plasma 5.19.0 It has been released just a few minutes ago. This is a major new update, which means it introduces new features to the entire KDE desktop, fixes some bugs, and well, to be true, it's expected to introduce others as well, but these will be totally unknown until let us discover them.
There are outstanding novelties on all fronts, such as the desktop and its widgets, changes to System Preferences, Information Center, Kwin, Discover, and KSysGuard. In addition to the new functions, dozens (or hundreds) of small changes related to bug fixes and performance and interface improvements have also been introduced, some that have not been mentioned in the official release note but in articles such as this (or looking for KDE on this blog -direct link to search-) that Nate Graham has posted over the weekends.
Plasma 5.19.0 Highlights
- Plasma Desktop and Widgets:
- They have improved the panel spacer so that it can automatically center the widgets.
- The system monitor widgets have been rewritten from scratch.
- Plasma now has a consistent layout and header area in systray applets, as well as notifications.
- The appearance of the media player applet in the System Tray and the Task Manager tooltip has been updated.
- There are completely new photo avatars to choose from.
- You can now see the name of the creator of a desktop background when you go to choose one.
- Sticky notes get usability improvements.
- We now have more control over the visibility of the volume OSDs during certain situations.
- GTK 3 applications immediately apply a newly selected color scheme and GTK 2 applications no longer have broken colors.
- The default fixed width font size has been increased from 9 to 10.
- The audio widget shows a more consistent appearance with a more attractive interface for changing the current audio device.
- System preferences:
- The default application pages, online accounts, global shortcuts, KWin rules, and background services have been improved.
- When launching the System Preferences modules from KRunner or the Application Launcher, the full System Prefeerencis application launches on the page you requested.
- The display settings page now shows the aspect ratio for each available screen resolution.
- We now have more granular control over the speed of Plasma animation.
- Configurable file indexing for individual directories has been added and we can now disable hidden file indexing.
- Now there is an option that allows us to configure the scrolling speed of the mouse and the touchpad in Wayland.
- Many small improvements have been made to the font settings.
- Information Center:
- The Information Center application has been redesigned with an image consistent with System Preferences.
- It is now possible to view the information about our hardware graphics.
- kwin:
- The new subfloor cutout for Wayland greatly reduces flicker in many applications.
- The icons in the title bars are now recolored to fit the color scheme rather than being difficult to see at times.
- Screen rotation for convertible tablets and laptops now works in Wayland.
- Discover:
- Flatpak repositories in use are now easier to remove.
- Now shows the version of the app for reviews.
- Its visual consistency and usability have been improved.
- KSysGuard has added support for systems with CPUs with more than 12 cores.
- Complete list of changes to this link.
Available now, soon on Discover
As usual, the fact that a software has been released does not mean that it is available to everyone right now. KDE has released the code for Plasma 5.19.0 and while it will arrive sooner than when some applications are updated, they have yet to deliver the new version to your Backports repository or the special ones that use operating systems like KDE neon. To clarify something else, Plasma is the graphical environment and does not have much to do with applications, so no new versions of Kdenlive, Gwenview, Spectacle and the rest of KDE apps will arrive today.