While I was adding the text of plasma 5.24.5 to the header image I was thinking that it is a fifth point version and that it marks the end of the life cycle of the series, but no, it is not like that. Yes it is a fifth maintenance update, but 5.24 is LTS, the one that uses Kubuntu 22.04, and will continue to receive some updates to further polish things.
But the really important thing here is that Plasma 5.24.5 has been released, and has arrived with a significant tweak list considering that the 5.24 series was initially thought to have been successful, plus four maintenance patches have already been released which have also fixed many issues. In any case, Plasma 5.24.5 was scheduled for today, it has already been released and in the following list you can read some of its novelties.
What's New in Plasma 5.24.5
- The folder popup that can be opened to display the contents of folders on the desktop is no longer annoyingly two pixels too narrow to display an additional grid cell.
- When Discover installs updates for packages that have multiple architectures available (for example, 32-bit and 64-bit versions, due to having Steam installed), it now installs updates for all architectures instead of a pseudo-random set of them, which would cause problems to the operating system.
- In the Plasma Wayland session:
- Fixed a case where a misbehaving application could cause KWin to crash.
- Changing display settings in certain ways (eg rotating and moving a display without also changing its refresh rate) no longer sometimes causes KWin to crash.
- When a window requests activation using the official Wayland activation protocol in order to bring up its own window, but this is denied by KWin for whatever reason, the window's Task Manager icon now uses the orange background color "needs attention », just like in X11.
- Fixed a case where KWin could crash while the screen was locked.
- Unlocking the screen no longer causes various visual glitches everywhere.
- Activating Task Manager tasks via a Meta+[number] keyboard shortcut now always does what is expected, regardless of how many grouped tasks you have and whether they were last accessed with the mouse or keyboard.
- The KWin window rule "Virtual Desktops" now works correctly.
- In the Plasma Wayland session, SDL apps no longer crash when an external display is unplugged.
- KWin no longer crashes when connected USB-C monitors wake up from their power saving states.
- The Global Menu widget now works correctly when its optional “be a hamburger menu” mode that is often used for vertical panels is activated
- Discover no longer constantly crashes, either on startup or when visiting the Installed page, if you have the Flatpak backend enabled with certain types of Flatpak commands.
- In the X11 Plasma session, fixed a case where KWin could crash when the laptop lid was closed while an external display was connected.
- The Comics widget is working again.
- On the System Quick Settings page, the "Change wallpaper..." button now works when you have more than one Activity.
- Searching in KRunner, in the application launcher, in the overview (or in any other search powered by KRunner) now returns matches that are text files, or that use a file format that inherits from the plain text format.
- Closing the Widget Explorer sidebar now clears it, saving some memory and fixing a bug where the previous search query was inappropriately remembered the next time it was opened.
- The battery widget now always appears in the system tray on login, instead of sometimes being missing until Plasma is manually restarted.
- Some monitors no longer constantly turn on in a loop when connected.
- Anyone can change their favorites back in Kickoff and Kicker and have those changes persist after restarting Plasma or the computer.
- After installing a Flatpak app using Discover, there's no longer a tricky "Install" button there anyway.
- Plasma no longer randomly crashes when you have more than one application with multiple windows open and interact with one of the Task Manager tooltips.
- The global menu widget no longer shows menus that the app has marked as hidden, such as Kolourpaint's "Tools" menu.
The release of Plasma 5.24.5 has been made official a few minutes ago, and it will soon arrive on KDE neon and Kubuntu 22.04.