I remember when KDE He launched Plasma 5.20.0. It was October, Kubuntu 20.10 was days away, and I thought 'when Groovy Gorilla comes I'll install it«. The days passed and it did not reach the Backports repository, nor the following versions. Soon after we realized that it would not, that it depends on a more updated version of Qt and we would still have to wait. So hey, today's news is that the project launched plasma 5.20.5, but for many everything will remain the same.
Plasma 5.20.5 is the latest maintenance release in this series and as such it is here to continue to fix the bugs you have found in previous releases. And they were not few, as Nate Graham told us, and the most affected system was the one that most controls the project, its KDE neon. Below you have a small unofficial, but real list, with the most notable changes that have come along with this version.
Plasma 5.20.5, most outstanding news
- Plasma no longer crashes when visiting the Units tab of the Time applet a second time.
- The systray expansion arrow no longer sometimes disappears when there are only a small number of items in the expanded view.
- The Emoji picker opens once more to display your Recent page.
- Meetings / screencasts using WebRTC now work in the Plasma Wayland session.
- The virtual keyboard on the lock and login screen no longer covers the password field when it appears.
- When viewing an app's details in Discover, a fun little tooltip for app licensing no longer always appears; it is now only visible when you hover over the link to the full text of your license, as expected.
- The Comics applet now displays icons on the tab bar tabs, as it was always supposed to do.
- The Bluetooth applet and its page in System Preferences now only show paired devices; available devices are displayed in a separate list, only visible when adding new devices.
- Full list of official changes, with less pleasant language, here.
Soon in KDE neon; the rest, patience
plasma 5.20.5 it's official, but, as always, this does not mean that we can install it easily on our Linux distribution. The first system to have it available will be KDE neon, where it will probably arrive in the next few hours. Later it will be added by other distributions, among which the Rolling Releases will get up earlier, although this does not mean that it will do so soon; it may take a few days or even a week (s).
If you are a Kubuntu + Backports PPA user and you did not know it yet, I am sorry to tell you that you will not be able to install it, in fact never, since the project can't do backport because of Qt dependency. In April, Kubuntu 20.10 will arrive with Plasma 5.21.x.