KDE usually releases new versions of Plasma on Tuesday. What happened last week is that the project's birthday fell on Thursday, so the 25th anniversary edition it was launched five days ago. Starting today, the calendar will return to normal, and a few moments ago they have made official the launch of plasma 5.23.1.
Plasma 5.23.1 is a point update, which means that no new features have been added, but yes fixes that will make everything better. A few tweaks here, some there, some under the hood and here we have the first knit update. The following list is part of what Nate Graham gave us last weekend, and it doesn't seem short considering that there has only been five days of difference from the first version.
Some new features of Plasma 5.23.1
- Automatic screen rotation now works while using the "tablet mode only" setting.
- Login via the 'Others' ... page of the login screen, where a username and password can be entered, works again.
- Plasma Wayland session no longer crashes immediately after login if advanced keyboard settings "Right Alt never chooses third level" is used.
- KWin no longer randomly crashes when exiting Firefox.
- The kded5 background daemon no longer crashes randomly when using a multiscreen configuration.
- Discover no longer crashes when clicking on the "Installed" page when using a distro such as Gentoo that does not have applications packaged on the distro and using Discover to get Flatpaks and Snaps.
- Right-clicking a file on the desktop when multiple files are selected no longer deselects all files that were not right-clicked.
- OpenConnect VPNs can now connect as expected if you have an FSID-protected passphrase with a user certificate but no private key.
- In the Plasma Wayland session, some application windows no longer open to the smallest size possible the first time the applications are started.
- In the Plasma Wayland session, maximized GNOME applications now fully update their content across the entire window, not just most of it.
- The change of views in the application panel is now nice and fast.
Now available
The release of Plasma 5.23.1 it's official, which means that the developers of the different Linux distributions can now start working with the code. KDE neon will receive the new packages this afternoon, and maybe the Kubuntu + Backports PPA as well. The rest of the distributions will add it depending on their development model.