We're only three days into 2023, but KDE has an agenda and we have to stick to it. Today was scheduled to launch plasma 5.26.5, and we've already been handed what is the latest maintenance update for the penultimate version of 5.x. Already in February they will launch Pasma 5.27, with many important new features and preparing the way for the big leap, which will be taken to go up to Plasma 6.0, although they must first launch the five point updates.
As with every Plasma release, KDE has published several articles/notes about this release. In one of them tell us about their availability, while in another they facilitate the full list of changes. These lists are often long and unclear, so we focus on the most outstanding news which they had already been published during the weekends. Here you have some of them.
Plasma 5.26.5 Highlights
- Scrolling in the language list sheet on the Region & Language page of System Preferences is no longer almost unusually choppy.
- The Blend Changes KWin effect is no longer triggered when the foreground window is full screen, so when using the "Accent color from wallpaper" option and a slide background, you no longer experience, for example, the brief choppiness while watching a video in full screen when the wallpaper changes.
- Disabling middle mouse click paste in Plasma Wayland session no longer prevents typing text in some GTK applications.
- In the Plasma Wayland session:
- External displays now work when using multiple ARM devices.
- Fixed a case where KWin could crash in the Plasma Wayland session when connecting a laptop to a docking station.
- Critical notifications no longer appear in the Overview, Present Windows, and Desktop Grid effects.
Plasma 5.26.5 has been announced a few moments ago, and that means that It is now available, but in the form of binaries and stuff. In the next few hours all the software will arrive to KDE neon, the operating system that KDE controls the most. Its Backports repository might arrive later, but for Kubuntu 22.10; Jammy Jellyfish (22.04) uses another one and will stay on Plasma 5.25 until further notice. Rolling Release distributions should also upload new packages very soon.