We have a shiny new KDE Plasma 5.21 release. Here during this post, we take a glance at what’s the new features and the way you’ll catch on immediately.

The most popular, modern, and light-weight Linux desktop environment KDE Plasma arrives with its new release. Plasma 5.21 during away may be a major release considering the number of latest features, adoption of latest tech like systemd, and more refined for user experience.

Plasma 5.21 Has Been Released

Although Plasma already provides more customization options which no other Linux desktop provides today – that too, natively. And on the highest, it’s super friendly on your hardware. for instance, if you run the newest Plasma with KDE Neon during a 10-year-old system (such as i3) – it runs perfectly fine.
With of these advantages, the KDE team continuously pushes Plasma for better user experience and overall performance. That said, lets’ take a glance at what’s new in KDE Plasma 5.21 release.

New Application Launcher

Find, reach and run your apps faster and easier than ever with Plasma’s new app launcher.
The new launcher features two panes to form it simple to locate your programs and comes with improved keyboard, mouse, and touch input, boosting accessibility across the board.
Support for languages with right-to-left writing (such as Japanese and Arabic) has also improved. we’ve also included an alphabetical “All Applications” view, a grid view for your favourite tools, and placed all the facility actions (“Sleep”, “Restart”, “Shut Down”, etc.) at rock bottom of the launcher pop-up in order that they are always visible and available.

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Last but not least, we’ve fixed most of the bugs reported by users, guaranteeing smoother access to all or any of your stuff. If you favour the old Kickoff app launcher, however, it’s only a few clicks away in KDE’s software store.

Application theme improvements

Continuing with improvements to the design and feel, applications using Plasma’s default theme now have a refreshed colour scheme and sport a fresh unified header bar style with a clean, cool New Look.

Breeze Twilight

Meet Breeze Twilight: a mixture of a dark theme for Plasma and a light-weight theme for applications, so you’ll enjoy the simplest of both worlds. Find it within the Global Theme section of your Settings.

Plasma System Monitor

Plasma System Monitor may be a fresh app for monitoring system resources and is now an integral a part of Plasma. Plasma System Monitor provides a good sort of different views, offering a summary page with information on important core resources, like memory, disc space, network and CPU usage. It also provides a fast view of the applications consuming the foremost resources. This allows you to easily locate and zap applications or processes that are slowing your computer down.

If you would like more details, the Applications page shows you all the running applications alongside detailed statistics and graphs. A process page is additionally available for per-process information, and History shows the evolution of the utilization of your machine’s resources over time.

Finally, you’ll also create your own new customized pages using the page editor. This allows you to tailor the knowledge you get from your system to your needs.

KWin and Wayland

KDE is pushing to possess first-class support for Wayland, and Plasma 5.21 makes massive progress towards reaching that goal.

We have extensively refactored the compositing code in KWin and therefore the changes should reduce latency throughout all compositing operations. we’ve also added an impact within the compositing settings so you’ll choose whether you favor lower latency or smoother animations.

In addition, we’ve also added support for mixed-refresh-rate display setups on Wayland, e.g. you’ll have one screen refreshing at 144Hz and another at 60Hz, which is right for improving work-stations with multiple monitors. Preliminary support for multiple GPUs was also added on Wayland.

The virtual keyboard in Wayland has been improved and now supports GTK applications using the text-input-v3 protocol. The support for graphical tablets has also been improved and now includes all the controls that were missing within the previous version, like pad ring and pad buttons.

Apart from the various improvements instability, there are quite a few Plasma components that are becoming far better support in Wayland. KRunner, for instance, is now ready to list all open windows in Wayland, a replacement component within the panel’s system tray informs you of the keyboard layout, and that we now support features required for GTK 4, so all GTK 4 applications will now work.

System Settings

Plasma 5.21 brings a replacement page to System Settings: the Plasma Firewall settings. This configuration module allows you to found out and configure a firewall for your system.

A firewall can assist you to protect your system from intrusion from outside or block information you would like to stay private from leaving your machine. Plasma 5.21 provides a simplified way of configuring both UFW and firewalld, two of the foremost used firewall systems in Linux.

Multiple pre-existing configuration pages are completely rewritten and are now cleaner and easier to use. This has been the case for the Accessibility, Desktop Session and SDDM configuration modules.

Applets

The Media Player widget’s layout has been improved and now includes the list of applications currently playing music within the header as a tab bar. Another upgrade is that the album cover now takes up the entire width of the widget.

Plasma Mobile

Plasma has always been designed to adapt to all or any sorts of screens. It can work on a desktop but it’s also easily adaptable to figure on a mobile, tablet or anything in between. In Plasma 5.21 we are adding two new components for mobile within the official release.
* The Plasma Phone Components contains the mobile shell but also specific Plasma widgets adapted for Plasma Mobile.
* QQC2 Breeze Style may be a pure Qt Quick Controls 2 style. It visually fits in with the widget-based desktop Breeze theme and was optimized for lower RAM and GPU usage.

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