As scheduled, KDE He launched yesterday plasma 5.27.3, which is the third maintenance update of the 27 series, which will in turn be the last of the 5 series. A bit confusing about the numbers, but the third are updates to fix bugs, the second can be considered bigger, but the biggest and really important are those of the change of the first number, and after 5.27 the jump to 6.0 will be made.
Although KDE is already focusing on the sixes (Qt6, Plasma 6 and Frameworks 6), it is not forgetting what we currently have at hand, as demonstrated in the past. 5.27.2 and a bit also in Plasma 5.27.3 that they just released. There are fixes in a bit of everything, but the important thing is that they continue to improve what they consider the best release ever. Here is a list with some of the news you have come along to this point update.
Some new features of Plasma 5.27.3
- The new portal-based "Open With" dialog is no longer used by non-Portal applications; now they have the old dialog again.
- Bound buttons in Breeze-themed GTK apps like Rhythmbox now look better.
- When using an NVIDIA graphics card, after rebooting or waking the system from sleep, external displays no longer often turn off inappropriately, and also icons and text on all Plasma are no longer sometimes missing.
- Fixed a case where KWin could crash when changing window decoration themes.
- In the Plasma Wayland session, when the clipboard history has been set to a single item, it is now possible to copy text with a single copy action, not two.
- Desktop icons in the active activity should no longer rearrange inappropriately when the set of connected displays changes. However, during the research process they discovered that the code to store the desktop file position is inherently problematic and needs a fundamental rewrite, just like they did for the multi-screen layout in Plasma 5.27.
- For new users (not existing users), the system will now sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity by default, and will generate correct power profiles for convertible laptops.
- On Discover app pages, button rows are now converted to columns for narrow windows or the mobile interface, and their layout has also been streamlined and improved.
- Improved how the SDDM login screen works with a touch screen in the Plasma Wayland session: touch input works at all, tapping the soft keyboard button now opens it, and the keyboard layout list now can be scrolled with a swipe.
- Fixed another way in which the powerdevil power management subsystem could crash with certain multi-display setups.
- Fixed a way that apps could crash in the Plasma Wayland session when a screen goes to sleep.
- Color Night now works on ARM devices that do not support "Gamma LUTs" but do support "Color Transform Matrixes". It still doesn't work on NVIDIA GPUs because they don't support any of them.
- The red and blue color channels are no longer sometimes swapped during screencasting in the Plasma Wayland session.
- Image buttons in Breeze-themed GTK apps now display correctly.
Plasma 5.27.3 was announced yesterday March 14, so developers can already work with its code. The new packages are already available in KDE neon, and will soon be coming to the KDE Backports repository. It should also quickly reach distributions with the Rolling Release development model, such as Arch Linux and Manjaro, but for now in its testing branch. It will reach the rest of the distributions depending on the philosophy of their respective projects. The next update will be Plasma 5.27.4 and it will arrive in three weeks. After that, KDE will release Plasma 5's end-of-life release, five weeks apart.