As expected, KDE launched us plasma 5.27.8. It is the eighth maintenance update of the version of the graphical environment that was launched originally in February of this year, an LTS that will be the last of the 5 series and which still has more revisions left. In the last six weeks they have added quite a few patches if we take into account the deadlines, but we are not going to look at the gift horse's teeth.
It's a bit surprising that there are few fixes related to Wayland. Or not, depending on how you look at it. Plasma 6 will use Wayland by default, and the possibility that many of these fixes have been delayed for the next version of the graphical environment cannot be ruled out. The next News list is a summary of what is included in Plasma 5.27.8.
Plasma 5.27.8 Highlights
- When searching in the Kickoff app launcher, the initially selected item is now always the first one, not the one under the mouse pointer.
- Fixed a bug that could cause Night Color to not turn off correctly after waking the computer from sleep at a time when it would otherwise have already turned off automatically.
- In the volume and brightness OSD menus, the text “100%” no longer appears between two lines inappropriately in some languages.
- Fixed a rare bug that could cause Plasma to crash when some widgets updated their content while their popups were open.
- Pressing the Meta key to open and close the Kickoff app launcher no longer steals focus from the window it had before.
- Fixed Plasma crashing when launching an application using Task Manager with the tooltip open.
- A fix has been implemented for a rare issue that could cause Plasma to slow down and crash on systems that frequently change monitor layouts.
- In Wayland:
- Fixed another way KWin could crash when clicking on a window's decoration tooltip.
- OTHER + TAB through windows no longer goes backwards when Caps Lock is on.
- Fixed a way where taking screenshots using Spectacle could fail in the Plasma X11 session.
- System Monitor sensors and widgets of the same name now work correctly when the system uses locale C.
- The KDE desktop portal implementation now supports the new cross-desktop accent color standard.
- The separator line between the title bar/toolbar area in KDE applications and the content below it is now drawn with the correct stroke weight with a high DPI display.
- When running in a VM, Plasma now disables auto-sleep as it can sometimes cause the VM to hang.
- Hybrid suspension now works.
- The Accessibility page in System Preferences no longer erroneously prompts you to save changes when you exit it without making any changes.
Your code is now available, later in your distro
Plasma 5.27.8 ha was announced a few hours ago, and that means your code can now be downloaded to work with. For the end user, it means that everything is ready for the developers of the distribution they use to add the new packages, which will occur with a deadline that will vary depending on the philosophy of the distro.
As usual, the first to receive Plasma 5.27.8 will be KDE neon users, shortly after those from pure Rolling Release distributions such as Arch Linux and later the rest of the mortals. It is possible to compile and install part or all of the packages manually, but it is something that we do not want to recommend here due to the problems that could arise. The next version will be Plasma 5.27.9 which should arrive within six weeks.