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KDE Plasma 5.24 Beta Released with New Overview Effect, Fingerprint Support, and More
The KDE Project announced today the release of the beta version of the upcoming KDE Plasma
5.24 desktop environment series, a major update that comes with lots of new features and improvements.
KDE Plasma 5.24 comes with numerous changes that will make many of you happy.
For example, it introduces the long-anticipated support for fingerprint readers to unlock
the screen, as well as to authenticate in apps that require administration password,
and also to authenticate with sudo on the command-line.
Another interesting feature of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.24 desktop environment series
is a brand-new Overview effect that lets users control their virtual workspaces and find
search results from KRunner, all in one place.
The new Overview effect can be toggled with the Super+W keyboard shortcut and has a blurred
background by default.
The Plasma Wayland session continues to receive improvements in KDE Plasma 5.24, which introduces
support for colors greater than 8-bit, a new drawing tablet page in System Settings, support
for the “Minimize All Windows” widget, “DRM leasing” support, and the concept
of the “primary monitor”.
In addition, the Spectacle screenshot utility gained access to the “Active Window” mode
in Plasma Wayland, which improves stylus support and lets users cycle through more than two
activities at a time when using the Super+Tab keyboard shortcut.
Among other noteworthy changes, the KDE Plasma 5.24 desktop environment promises a more modern
design for the “Plasma Pass” password manager, full keyboard navigation for the
Clipboard and Network system tray widgets, much improved Breeze theme and system notifications,
as well as updated KRunner and Task Manager tools.
But wait, that’s not all, as KDE Plasma 5.24 also improves System Settings to let
you choose your own custom accent colors, support for the “Highlight Changed Settings”
option in Night Color, support for more batteries in the battery charge limit feature, and the
ability for the Display & Monitor page to show the scale factor used for each screen.
It also looks like the QtQuick-based effects in the KDE Plasma 5.24 desktop environment
will work better on NVIDIA GPUs, and Plasma will now shut down faster than before.
Of course, there are numerous other changes that you can check out in the release announcement
page.
KDE Plasma 5.24 Beta is available for public testing right now via the Unstable edition
of the KDE neon GNU/Linux distribution, which you can download from here.
However, please be aware that this is a pre-release version aimed at testers that want to help
the devs correct problems in KDE’s Plasma desktop.
The final KDE Plasma 5.24 release will be available on February 8th, 2022.
:: More ::
KDE Plasma 5.24 – Top New Features and Release Details
the top new features of upcoming KDE Plasma 5.24 desktop in this post and give you a heads-up
on what’s in store.
In brief Exciting release from KDE Plasma team – and
first release of 2022.
Features, updates spread across the entire KDE desktop ecosystem, including KDE Applications
and Frameworks.
The major highlight is the new overview feature.
For details, read below.
Beta is already out on Jan 13, 2022.
Download links available at the end of this page.
Final release on February.
The first major Plasma release of 2022 is due soon.
And we feel it’s time that we uncover some of the unique features that KDE Plasma 5.24
is bringing into the table.
While scouting for the changes in GitLab, I found the changes are spread across UI,
desktop components, KWin, Wayland fixes, major design updates and many under the hood improvements.
So, it is difficult to list down every detail of it.
However, these are the important ones which I feel worth putting up in a post.
So here it is.
Schedule The final release of KDE Plasma 5.24 is expected
on Feb 8, 2022.
Beta is released on Jan 13, 2022.
KDE Plasma 5.24 – New Features
KDE Plasma 5.24 is based on KDE Framework 5.90 and Qt 5.15.2.
Perhaps the important change in this release is the new overview screen, which we talked
about it earlier.
The new Plasma overview screen is changing, and it somehow reminds you of GNOME’s own
overview.
That said, it’s the best of both the worlds, at least how it is designed.
As per the merge requests in GitLab, the new overview screen will be a full-screen view.
It features the list of virtual desktop as thumbnails at the top, with an option to add
more.
At the middle section of the overview screen, you can see the list of open windows of the
selected virtual desktop.
Between the list of virtual desktop and open windows, you have search bar.
The search is expected to mimic the KRunner type search, which find files/shortcuts across
your desktop.
The Search happens on the fly.
Search is done across your desktop – that is – applications, files, browser tabs,
documents – everything.
Oh, you can launch the overview via META+W key from the keyboard.
The System Setting’s own settings window is now available as menu items, thus eliminating
another settings dialog.
Custom selection of Accent color is now available via Appearance > Colors.
Earlier, you could only choose from a selection of preset colors.
A bunch of updates to the Breeze color theme lands in this release of Plasma.
Firstly, the “Breeze High Contrast” color scheme is deleted because Breeze Dark offers
similar look and feel anyway.
Secondly, the base Breeze color scheme is renamed to Breeze Classic for better identification.
The username text font size in login, lock and logout screens increased to an extent
to make it more consistence with the overall window and avatar image size.
This increases better readability and looks perfect now.
You can easily navigate using Home and End keys from the keyboard in the Krunner’s
results view.
System Settings’ Formats page is completely re-written and overhauled.
It looks much simpler with better readability with available options.
Weather applet in system tray now gives you a button to set the location.
Volume sliders in the Audio Volume applet once again have a background; two different
colors are used to distinguish the maximum volume level from the volume of the currently-playing
or recording audio
Discover is now more helpful to the new users by giving an option for searching the web
with keywords of application that is not found.
When clicked, it searches in DuckDuckGo via your default web browser.
Discover window is now responsive and adapts itself with two column view of applications
when resized.
You can easily enable, disable and remove Flatpak repositories in Discover.
Also, you can enable and disable distro specific repos.
Better bug reporting via a nice button in Discover which takes you directly to your
Linux distribution bug reporting page.
The notification about video files now show a thumbnail just like images.
Also, the header, title is now better visible with proper contrast settings.
Another handy feature that is coming to 5.24 is an orange strip on the left side of the
critical notifications that distinguishes it from other notifications.
So, that you can take notice of the critical ones.
The lock screen can now expose the Sleep and Hibernate options, if supported by the system.
If you are in a multi monitor system, the windows remembers their screens.
That means when you unplug and pug-in the monitors, you have windows exactly where they
were.
Newly opened windows now opens up at the center of the screens.
However, they retain their closing position when opened next time.
The startup sound issue while using Systemd is now fixed, and it plays nicely.
The preview in wallpaper chooser window displays wallpaper in the same aspect ratio of the
target screen for a more realistic preview.
Along with these, a bunch of Wayland fixes lands in this release that includes better
drag-and-drop, minimize all windows, primary Monitor in Wayland, and many bug fixes.
Following the tradition, a brand-new wallpaper (named “Wavy McWallpaperface”) is definitely
going to give KDE Plasma a fresh new look.
Download and Test
KDE Plasma 5.24 is under development at the moment.
You can try it out in the BETA copy or via KDE Neon Unstable Edition or openSUSE Krypton
(link below).
You can create bootable USB and try.
Unless you are planning to experiment or test, I would not recommend this running in a stable
system due to its nature.
Beta download
Beta version is released on Jan 13, 2022.
You can download the Beta .ISO copy from the official website.
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