In mid-October, KDE turned 25 years old. Two days before, on Tuesday, it was when it was time to launch a new version of its famous graphical environment, but they decided to delay this launch two days to coincide with the exact day of the anniversary. Not surprisingly, Plasma v5.23 received the label of the 25th anniversary edition. It introduced new features, and one of the most prominent was a new default theme, but, as in every release, there were also bugs to fix. Today, the calendar was marked by a point update, a plasma 5.23.3 that already has been announced.
Although there are still two point updates left for this series to reach the end of its life cycle, it is a bit surprising in Plasma 5.23.3 they have fixed so many bugs. Six of them are destined to improve Wayland, the graphical server of the future that is already part of the present in desktops like GNOME, although there are still things that do not work as they should. If so, there would not be so many problems recording the screen and the Ubuntu Live session would not open in X11. Although the truth is that not everything is the fault of Wayland, as shown by one of the bugs in the following list that has improved things in the Firefox web browser.
Some of the novelties of Plasma 5.23.3
- The Plasma Networks applet now allows you to successfully connect to an OpenVPN server with a .p12 certificate protected by a passphrase.
- In the Plasma Wayland session:
- Turning an external monitor off and back on no longer causes Plasma to hang.
- Hovering over the Digital Clock applet to display its tooltip no longer hangs Plasma.
- The show / hide animation of a panel set to auto-hide mode now works.
- Pasting arbitrary clipboard content into a file now works.
- Fixed a case where launching System Monitor could cause the ksgrd_network_helper process to crash.
- The Minimize All effect / widget / button now remembers which window was active and makes sure that window ends up on top by restoring all minimized windows.
- Changing from a dashboard widget to an alternate one using the "Alternatives ..." popup no longer reorders widgets.
- Switching between virtual desktops when windows are maximized no longer causes the panel to flicker, especially when using a dark color scheme or Plasma theme.
- The 'large focus rings' feature from Plasma 5.24 has been carried over to Plasma 5.23 as it resolves a number of focus related bugs and issues and has proven to be stable so far.
- Right-clicking the systray icon of a GTK application no longer causes all hell to break loose.
- Desktop items with emblems in the lower right corner (such as the "I am a symbolic link" emblem) no longer display two slightly different sized emblems, one stacked on top of the other.
- Applying any changes to the System Preferences keyboard page no longer resets the Num Lock setting to its default value.
- The back button at the top of the System Preferences subcategory column can now be activated with a touch screen and stylus.
- In the Plasma Wayland session, Firefox now responds better to drag and drop files.
- In the Plasma Wayland session, the panel auto-hide animation now works correctly.
Your code now available
plasma 5.23.3 has been announced a few minutes ago, which means that your code is now available for developers to start working with. KDE neon, the operating system that most controls the KDE project, will receive it this afternoon, if it has not already been received, and a little later it will arrive at KDE Backports repository. Rolling Release distributions will receive it in the next few days.