KDE Plasma 5.23 Desktop Environment Is Out Now to Celebrate 25 Years of KDE.
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The KDE Project announced today the release and general availability of the KDE Plasma
5.23 desktop environment, a major update that brings new features and improvements, and
also commemorates 25 years of KDE.
On October 14th, 2021, the KDE Project turns 25 years, and what better way to celebrate
than with a new Plasma desktop release. KDE Plasma 5.23 is out now and brings over 120
changes to make the beloved desktop environment more stable, reliable, and enjoyable than
ever.
“Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition is a leap forward in the quest for a more performant
and usable desktop. We have improved the speed and stability of Plasma, while including changes
that make it easier to use both on desktop and touch-enabled devices,” said KDE.
Wayland is becoming more and more mature and popular, used by default by many acclaimed
GNU/Linux distributions like Fedora Linux or Ubuntu, so the KDE Plasma 5.23 release
brings numerous improvements to its Plasma Wayland session.
These include the ability to drag and drop and middle-click paste stuff between native
Wayland and XWayland apps, the ability to adjust the Broadcast RGB settings of the Intel
graphics driver, more intuitive touchpad gestures, as well as support for remembering virtual
desktops on a per-activity basis.
There’s also a new screen rotation animation, faster user switching, animated feedback icons
when launching apps, a new notification in the system tray area to tell you when something
is recording your screen and to allow you to cancel it, as well as the ability to change
the screen resolution when running Plasma in a virtual machine.
Furthermore, the text copied from within the Plasma desktop will now appears in the global
clipboard, re-opening an app with a maximized window state will now open it on the screen
with the mouse cursor on it, and Plasma now retains multi-screen layouts across X11 and
Wayland sessions. Of course, many other pesky bugs and crashes were squashed to make Plasma
Wayland more usable as a daily driver.
In addition to the Plasma Wayland improvements, KDE Plasma 5.23 makes the Plasma Discover
graphical package manager faster to load and more transparent by showing you a source’s
name in the app install button, and adds a pin button to the Kickoff application menu
so you can pin the menu on the screen, along with the ability to configure the Power/Session
action button.
Plasma is known as one of the best looking Linux desktop environments out there, so the
25th Anniversary Edition introduces new options to make Plasma even more pleasant to use.
These include an updated Breeze theme with redesigned buttons, checkboxes, menu items,
radio buttons, scrollbars, sliders, and spinboxes, as well as support for overriding a color
scheme’s accent color in System Setting’ Colors page.
But wait, there’s more! Plasma 5.23 also improves System Settings to make it easier
for users to find various options with a much-improved search functionality, change the screen refresh
rates, set the status of their Bluetooth adapter on login, revert unwanted display settings,
prevent geolocation using third-party services in the Night Color page, as well as to sync
your screen arrangements in the Login Screen page.
Widgets and Applets enrich your Plasma desktop experience, so this release adds more details
about the currently connected network and lets you disable IPv6 in Plasma NetworkManager,
shows load averages on System Monitor and sensor widgets, makes it possible for the
Audio Volume applet to distinguish between apps that play or record audio, and lets you
delete selected items in the Clipboard applet’s popup.
Other noteworthy changes include three power profiles, including “power-saver,” “balanced”
and “performance,” improves to the tablet mode to make Plasma easier to use on touch
screens, a more “menu-like” appearance for the Global Menu applet, better support
for Flatpak and Snap apps, improved support for multi-monitor setups, and better support
for Bluetooth drawing tablets.
The KDE Plasma 5.23 desktop environment is out today and it will be available shortly
in the software repositories of various popular rolling-release distributions like KDE neon,
openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Arch Linux. In combination with the recent KDE Frameworks 5.87 and KDE
Gear 21.08.2 software suite releases, Plasma is probably one of the best, modern, and complex
desktop environments you can use on your Linux distro.
:: KDE Plasma 5.23 Continues the Trend of Incremental Improvements ::
The new KDE Plasma 5.23 release offers users a more beautiful Plasma desktop and immersive
experience for its 25th Anniversary.
Let’s start with some clarification: KDE Plasma 5.23 desktop environment has just been
released, but if you were expecting a revolution in how you use your desktop, that is not the
release for you.
This release is mainly focused on small but very useful features and incremental improvements.
And to be honest, it has done a brilliant job with this task. So let’s go through
the updates.
KDE Plasma 5.23 Highlights
One of the big innovations in this release is the Accent colors. That is possibly the
biggest update of the whole release and it’s a very nice addition.
There are some desktops that had this already like Zorin OS or elementary OS, and now Plasma
has it too. It means that you can just hit “System Settings”, go to the “Colors”
section and then just change the accent from blue to whatever you like.
The next big thing in KDE Plasma 5.23 is the Breeze theme redesign. Not for the Plasma
desktop and its widgets, but for the applications themselves.
The new theme has been long in the making and was released in small increments, notably
with the unified title bars and tollbars or the small rounded corners in the menus. And
now the rest of the interface gets changed as well.
At first glance probably most people would be hard pressed to tell the difference, but
there really is. Everything has a more polished edge to it. Now the Breeze theme is less flat
with more gradients and shadows. The highlights and depth are more pronounced and the elements
feel more tactile.
The changes also affect the Breeze dark theme, which received a lot more contrast and depth
as well.
In addition, the scrollbars have been made a bit bigger to make them easier to interact
with. There is also a new spinning gear when you are waiting for something to happen.
In KDE Plasma 5.23, the right click menu now uses a nicer highlight for elements on hover,
not just a solid color, and looks really pretty good.
The Kickoff menu also received a lot of improvements. On top of the code base receiving a major
overhaul to fix many bugs it also performs better and opens faster.
The menu gets a few new features. First, you can view apps in a grid or a list in the favorites
and all categories of the menu. Moreover you can also pin the menu to the screen if you
want to have it always up.
As for the network widget, Plasma now shows more details about the currently-connected
network, including the speed. In addition, the audio volume applets now will differentiate
between apps that are playing audio and apps that are recording audio.
In terms of the system settings there also have been a lot of smaller improvements. The
most important change is in the search feature of the settings. Previously you could only
search for the name of the categories and some elements like the tab names or the entries
in the desktop effects lists. KDE Plasma 5.23 adds a lot of keywords to make that search
more useful
How to Get KDE Plasma 5.23
The easiest way to try it out is via KDE Neon Linux distro. Just navigate to the download
page and get the User Edition ISO file. You can try on a virtual machine or install it
as a fresh system.
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