Plasma 5.19 Beta: Consistency, Control and Usability

Thursday, 14 May 2020

It's time to test the beta release for Plasma 5.19!

In this release, we have prioritized making Plasma more consistent, correcting and unifying designs of widgets and desktop elements; worked on giving you more control over your desktop by adding configuration options to the System Settings; and improved usability, making Plasma and its components easier to use and an overall more pleasurable experience.

Read on to discover all the new features and improvements of Plasma 5.19…

Plasma Desktop and Widgets

• We have improved the panel spacer so that it can automatically center widgets.
• The System Monitor widgets have been rewritten from scratch.

• Plasma now has a consistent design and header area in system tray applets as well as notifications.

• We have refreshed the look of the media playback applet in the System Tray and of Task Manager tooltips.
• There are completely new photographic avatars to choose from.

• You can now see the name of the creator of a desktop wallpaper when you go to pick one.
• Sticky notes get usability improvements.
• You now have more control over the visibility of volume OSDs during certain situations.
• GTK 3 applications immediately apply a newly selected color scheme and GTK 2 applications no longer have broken colors.
• We have increased the default fixed-width font size from 9 to 10.
• The audio widget shows a more consistent appearance with a more attractive interface for switching the current audio device.

System Settings

• Default Applications, Online Accounts, Global Shortcuts, KWin Rules and Background Services settings pages have all been overhauled.

• When launching System Settings modules from within KRunner or the application launcher, the complete System Settings application launches on the page you asked for.

• The Display settings page now shows the aspect ratio for each available screen resolution.
• You now have more granular control over Plasma's animation speed.
• We have added configurable file indexing for individual directories and you can now disable indexing for hidden files.
• There is now an option that lets you configure the mouse and touchpad scroll speed under Wayland.
• We have made lots of small improvements to the font configuration.

Info Center

• The Info Center application has been redesigned with a look and feel that is consistent with the System Settings.
• It is now possible to see information about your graphics hardware.

KWin Window Manager

• The new subsurface clipping for Wayland greatly reduces the flickering in many applications.
• Icons in titlebars are now recolored to fit the color scheme instead of sometimes being hard to see.
• Screen rotation for tablets and convertable laptops now works on Wayland.

Discover

• Flatpak repositories in use are easier to remove now.
• Discover displays the application version for reviews.
• Discover improved its visual consistency and usability.

KSysGuard

• Our system monitor KSysGuard has gained support for systems with more than 12 CPU cores.