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KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS Releases with Updated Breeze Theme and New Overview Effect
KDE Plasma 5.24 brings in an updated Breeze theme, a new overview effect, new wallpaper,
and further refinements.
From spotting the GNOME-Style overview effect to the addition of fingerprint support.
If you have been following our coverages, you already know about the changes introduced
with KDE Plasma 5.24.
Now that KDE Plasma 5.24 stable release is finally here, let me highlight the key additions
and improvements below.
KDE Plasma 5.24: What’s New?
KDE Plasma 5.24 is a long-term support release that will receive updates until the final
Plasma 5 release (and the transition to Plasma 6).
With this release, you do not get to see massive visual changes, but you can find various functional
improvements and subtle visual refinements.
Updates to the Breeze Theme
The breeze theme received some visual tweaks to improve the visual consistency with the
Breeze style for apps.
In addition to that, the default Breeze color scheme has been renamed to Breeze Classic
to separate it from Breeze Light and Breeze Dark color themes.
The ability to choose accent colors was originally introduced with KDE Plasma 5.23, but now you
can select a custom color as well.
Improvements to Notifications
To visually differentiate important notifications, you will notice an orange strip on the side
to help them stand out from less urgent messages.
Furthermore, to enhance the user experience, if the notification is about a video/image,
the notification displays a thumbnail of the content to give you a visual cue.
Overview Effect
With KDE Plasma 5.24, you finally get to witness the new Overview effect.
Note that the feature is still in beta testing.
It lets you easily dabble through multiple desktops and comes disabled out of the box.
You will have to head to the System settings → Workspace Behavior → Desktop Effects
to enable it under Window Management options and test it out.
You can hold down the Windows/Super key and press the W key to see the overview of all
your active windows and virtual desktops.
Improvements to Discover
The software center for KDE i.e “Discover” also received some upgrade including the ability
to prevent users from deleting essential packages.
It also lets you automatically restart after an update.
So, you do not have to wait for an update to complete, to reboot your system.
In addition to that, you can now open locally downloaded Flatpak packages and install it
via Discover (the repository should be added automatically as well).
Fingerprint Support in Lock Screen/Login With Plasma 5.24, fingerprint authentication
support has been added.
You can add up to 10 fingerprints and use them to unlock the screen or authenticate
an action within an app.
Other Improvements There are several other changes with Plasma
5.24.
You can go through the changelog for all technical details.
Some highlights include:
On-screen keyboard improvements The “Plasma Pass” password manager has
a modernized design Battery and Brightness now turns into just
Brightness controls on computers with no batteries Improvements to Krunner
When you drag-and-drop widgets, they now smoothly animate moving to their final position rather
than instantly teleporting there A new button on the “About this System”
page lets you quickly access the Info Center The active windows stay in their respective
desktop screens even if the screen was turned off or unplugged.
As of now, you can try KDE Plasma 5.24 using KDE Neon, which focuses on providing the latest
and greatest KDE packages.
Note that it may not be a complete desktop replacement to other popular Linux distributions.
If you want the latest KDE Plasma on your current distribution, you will have to wait
until it hits the default repositories.
What do you think about KDE Plasma 5.24?
Have you tried it yet?
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
:: More ::
New effects, improved theme, and tons of finesse
KDE Plasma 5.24 Released, This is What’s New
KDE Plasma 5.24 is out and (as we’ve come to expect) it is chock full of performance
improvements, user interface refinements, and even a few handy new features.
In this post I run through the most notable and noticeable changes shipping in KDE Plasma
5.24, plus tell you how you can try the release out first hand.
While we’re on the subject: if you’re a fan of KDE Plasma and you want to see more
coverage of the DE on omg!
do let me know in the comments.
While Plasma is not a desktop environment I’m super familiar with (thus I don’t
know my way around it very well) its ballooning popularity —even the Steam Deck uses it,
well kinda— has me intrigued!
Okay, on to what’s new.
KDE Plasma 5.24: Key Changes The Breeze theme is synonymous with the KDE
Plasma desktop and for this release devs say they’ve made a number of tweaks to the stock
Breeze theme aimed at making Plasma “even more pleasant to use”, such as changing
the focus effect to be easier to see.
But the “big” change for me is that folder icons now respect whatever accent colour you’ve
set (or is configured in a colour schemes’ ‘selection’ colour).
Related: you can now set a custom accent colour, too.
screenshot of KDE Plasma 5.24 folders with accent colour enabled
Folders now inherit the accent colour The window effect for opening and closing
apps in Plasma 5.24 now use ‘scale’ effect by default rather than the ‘fade’ effect
as before.
New windows spawn in the center of a screen by default and, rather helpfully, devs had
made it possible to assign a keyboard shortcut to move the active window to the center.
The ‘scale’ closing effect KDE Plasma 5.24 also includes a new Overview
effect (press super + w) to access virtual desktops, see KRunner results, and manage
open windows, all atop a newly blurred background (which can be disabled):
Overview effect, in effect You can now right-click on an image file and
set it as the wallpaper — I know, revolutionary!
😆It’s always been relatively trivial to change wallpaper in KDE Plasma but this
context menu saves time, and is keeping with similar features offered in most other DEs
and OSes.
Notifications are an integral part of the modern desktop experience and in KDE Plasma
a bunch of tweaks aim to make these toasts both more beautiful and more useful.
For instance, critical notifications now have visual differentiation from regular notifications
(i.e. so you notice them); notifications about vide files show a thumbnail (just like for
image files); and a notification is now always shown when sending or receiving files via
Bluetooth.
a screenshot of the kickoff app menu in KDE Plasma 5.24
De-arrowed KickOff app menu The app launcher in KDE Plasma 5.24 looks
nicer now it’s ditched the arrows trailing category names in the left-hand sidebar.
While those arrows were functional indicators they were, visually, out of keeping with other
areas of the Plasma desktop (and pretty ungainly to gawk at).
Other widget changes include a revamped ‘Plasma Pass’ widget; a ‘configure’ prompt when
adding the weather widget for the first time; and fully keyboard navigable Clipboard and
Network widgets.
An Improved ‘Discover’ Experience
Discover is more adaptive in Plasma 5.24 On to Discover, KDE Plasma’s go-to software
manager.
A number of improvements feature here (ahead of redesigns planned for future releases),
including an easy way to manage Flatpak repositories, open and install downloaded Flatpaks, and
auto-adding Flatpak repositories to the system during install.
The Discover home page adapts to a two-column card view when very large and a bottom-tabbed
view when very narrow, while the search feature attempts to help users if nothing is found
for their search by asking if they want to search online (i.e. outside of Discover).
The Update page only shows progress bars for in-progress items, now tells you the source
of the updates, and gains an option to automatically reboot after applying a set of reboot-required
updates.
Other changes A wealth of Wayland-orientated changes have
been wrangled into this release, including a new drawing tablet age in System Settings;
support for DRM leasing (useful for VR headsets); support for more tha. 8-bit colour mode; and
a working ‘active window’ option in the Spectacle screenshot tool.
Elsewhere, the “minimise all windows” widget now works in Wayland; the virtual keyboard
only appears when it’s supposed to; and the default super + tab shortcut can be used
to cycle through more than two activities at a time.
Other notable changes in KDE Plasma 5.24:
“Picture of the Day” plugin has new source “Configure Display Settings” item in the
Desktop context menu Desktop icons can now be made twice as large
as before Option to reverse alignment of tasks in Task
Manager New inline help feature in KRunner
Revamped speaker test sheet in Audio settings page
Scale factor listed in Display & Monitor settings page
Fingerprint support in the lock screen Window thumbnails on task manager pop up faster
App playing audio have volume slider in tool tip
Lock screen adds options for Sleep and Hibernate (where supported)
Support for the FreeDesktop light/dark color scheme preference
Kate replaced with KWrite Middle-clicking on a panel to create a sticky
note is gone Plasma no longer accepts new connections after
shutdown has started Do cast your eyes over the full (and I do
mean full) change-log for this update for further detail on the changes highlighted
in this post, as well as many more.
Getting KDE Plasma 5.24 KDE Plasma 5.24 will land in KDE Neon shortly
(the developer edition already has it).
Rolling release distros (Arch, Manjaro, et al) will promptly package this update and
push it out to their users.
Using Kubuntu?
You can look forward to trying KDE Plasma 5.24 (or a later revision) in Kubuntu 22.04
in April, though keep an eye on the Kubuntu backports PPA in the meantime as it may let
you upgrade to Plasma 5.24 on Kubuntu 21.10.
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