This week, KDE He launched Plasma 5.22 beta. It will be, according to themselves, a version of the desktop that will focus on stability and usability. Today, like every Saturday, Nate Graham posted an article about what's new they are working on and mentioned one coming from Plasma 5.23. It will be one of those changes that some users will like more and others less, but it is already known that it never rains to everyone's liking.
The change you mentioned that will come along with plasma 5.23 is that the translucent effect has been disabled by default, which will mean that the windows will be "solid" when we move them. Logically and like almost everything on the KDE desktop, it will be possible to return to the current behavior, something that I will probably do in the future.
As a new feature, this week they only mentioned one coming in KDE Plasma 5.22: the digital clock applet will include an option to display time zones for UTC as well.
Bug fixes and performance improvements coming to KDE
- Okular now correctly renders PNG images embedded in comic .cbz files (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 21.04.2).
- Gwenview now uses a standard graphics component provided by Qt for its image view, which fixes a common screen corruption bug when panning and zooming, reduces memory usage, and improves responsiveness, particularly with pinch gestures. -to-zoom (Arjen Hiemstra, Gwenview 21.08).
- In Plasma Wayland, the Plasma browser integration application no longer hangs in a loop when Firefox asks whether or not it may be the default browser, which it does too often due to a bug in Firefox itself when the environment variable GTK_USE_PORTALS = 1 is set, as is the default in Neon and Fedora (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.22).
- In Plasma Wayland, KWin no longer sometimes hangs when an external display goes to sleep or disconnects (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22).
- The new Plasma System Monitor application no longer crashes on closing after many page changes (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22).
- When using the Systemd login function, the session can now be unlocked using the loginctl utility from the command line (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22).
- In Plasma Wayland, it now works to drag and drop tasks from the Task Manager to the Pager applet to move them to different virtual desktops (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22).
- In Plasma Wayland, the optional titlebar button showing a window's menu structure no longer strangely appears as a separate window, and navigating with the keyboard now works correctly as well (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22).
- The new Plasma System Monitor application no longer sometimes displays two "Name" columns in multiple table views (David Redondo, Plasma 5.22).
- The new calendar no longer shows too many dots in the Month and Year views (Carl Schwan, Frameworks 5.83).
- Fixed the most common join loop (causing registration spam, as well as reduced performance) in QtQuick-based applications (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.83).
- Plasma tab buttons with icons and text re-center the content, this time without letting the text overflow (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.83).
Interface improvements
- Dolphin has now adopted KHamburgerMenu, allowing you to adjust the content of the hamburger menu to be much more relevant, less redundant, less intimidating, and less prone to overflowing on small screens. All the functions are still there, only they have been reorganized so that the most common are easier to access and the less common are no longer so flashy (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 21.08).
- Gwenview's default toolbar layer has been modified to be simpler and more user-friendly (Felix Ernst, Gwenview 21.08).
- Several improvements have been made to the user experience of Okular's quick annotation tools, such as the ability to toggle them, remember the last one used, and keep the quick annotation tools separate from the complex full toolbar view (Simone Giarin , Okular 21.08).
- The systray printers applet has been made simpler and more consistent by changing its settings button to open the relevant system settings page and moving its apple-specific options to the hamburger menu, just like the disk applet does. and devices (Nate graham, print-manager 21.08).
- Now you can deactivate the "Open Terminal" item in the Dolphin context menu (Alexander Lohnau, Dolphin 21.08).
- When Dolphin is showing hidden files, they are now placed after all visible files, instead of before them (Gastón Haro, Dolphin 21.08).
- Using the Kate function to display the differences between the open version of a file and the version that was just updated on disk no longer populates recent file lists with temporary ".diff" files (Méven Car, Kate 21.08 ).
- The desktop 'translucency' effect is now disabled by default, so windows no longer become slightly translucent when moved or resized (Nate Graham and Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23).
- The "Add New Device" button of the System Tray Bluetooth applet is now in the header, being consistent with other System Tray applets (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22).
- It is now possible to make the icons in the icon-only Task Manager automatically sort by various criteria (alphabetically, by desktop, etc.) exactly as it can be done with the traditional Task Manager (Marko Gobin, Plasma 5.22).
Arrival dates for all of this in KDE
Plasma 5.22 is coming June 8, kdegear 21.04.2 will be available two days later, on June 10, and KDE Gear 21.08 will arrive in August, but we still don't know what day exactly. Two days after the set of apps will arrive Frameworks 5.83, specifically from June 12.
To enjoy all this as soon as possible we have to add the KDE Backports repository or use an operating system with special repositories like Kde neon or any distribution whose development model is Rolling Release, although the latter usually take a little longer than the KDE system.