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Plasma 5.25

New Looks

Plasma 5.25 brings new features and concepts to the desktop environment.

Tuesday, 14 June 2022

empty laptop with an overlay
Plasma
A host of new features and cool fresh concepts in Plasma 5.25 give you a peek into the future of KDE's desktop.

Highlights

Gestures

Gestures on touchpads and touchscreens put Plasma at your fingertips

Colors

Bored of grey? Plasma puts a literal rainbow of possibilities at your disposal

Tailor-made

Customizing your desktop has never been easier... or more fun!

KDE Plasma 5.25 redesigns and enhances how you navigate between windows and workspaces.

Overview

The Overview effect shows all of your open windows and virtual desktops.

You can search for apps, documents, and browser tabs with KRunner and the Application Launcher.

You can add, remove, and rename virtual desktops.

Gestures

On your touchpad:

A four-finger pinch opens the Overview.
A three-finger swipe in any direction will switch between Virtual Desktops.
A downwards four-finger swipe opens Present Windows.
A four-finger upwards swipe activates the Desktop Grid.

On your touchscreen:

You can configure swipes from the screen edge to open Overview, Desktop Grid, Present Windows, and Show Desktop as they directly follow your finger.

Colors

Sync the accent color with your wallpaper! The dominant color of your background picture can be applied to all components that use the accent color.

With slideshow wallpapers, colors update when the wallpaper changes.

Tint all colors of any color scheme using the accent color and adapt the color of elements of every window to the background. You can also choose how much tint you'd like to see mixed in with your normal color scheme.

While configuring your color scheme, you can also make the header area or titlebar use the accent color.

Touch and Feel

Activate Touch Mode by detaching the screen, rotating it 360°, or enabling it manually.

The Task Manager and the System Tray become bigger when in Touch Mode making it easier on your fingers. You can customize the size of the icons when Touch Mode is disabled, too.

Titlebars of KDE apps become taller when in Touch Mode, making it easier to press, drag, and close windows with touch. Context menu items become taller when in Touch Mode, giving you more space to tap the correct one.

Customization

Floating Panels add a margin all around the panel to make it float, while animating it back to look normal when a window is maximized.

Blend Effects gracefully animate the transition when color schemes are changed.

Move your entire desktop, with folders, widgets and panels, from one monitor to another with the Containment Management window.

Other Updates

  • The Global Theme settings page lets you pick and choose which parts to apply so you can apply only the parts of a global theme that you like best.

  • The Application page for Discover has been redesigned and gives you links to the application's documentation and website, and shows what system resources it has access to.

  • If you get your password wrong, the lock and login screens shake, giving you a visual cue to try again.

  • The KWin Scripts settings page has been rewritten making it easier to manage your window manager scripts.

  • Plasma panels can now be navigated with the keyboard, and you can assign custom shortcuts to focus individual panels.

... And there's much more going on. If you would like to see the full list of changes, check out the changelog for Plasma 5.25.

Package Downloads

Distributions have created, or are in the process of creating, packages listed on our wiki page.

Note that packages of this release might not be available on all distributions at the time of this announcement.

Package download wiki page

Supporting KDE

KDE is a Free Software community that exists and grows only because of the help of many volunteers that donate their time and effort. KDE is always looking for new volunteers and contributions, whether it is help with coding, bug fixing or reporting, writing documentation, translations, promotion, money, etc. All contributions are gratefully appreciated and eagerly accepted. Please read through the Supporting KDE page for further information or become a KDE e.V. supporting member through our Join the Game initiative.

About KDE

KDE is an international technology team that creates free and open source software for desktop and portable computing. Among KDE's products are a modern desktop system for Linux and UNIX platforms, comprehensive office productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of software titles in many categories including Internet and web applications, multimedia, entertainment, educational, graphics and software development. KDE software is translated into more than 60 languages and is built with ease of use and modern accessibility principles in mind. KDE's full-featured applications run natively on Linux, BSD, Windows, Haiku, and macOS.


Trademark Notices.

KDE® and the K Desktop Environment® logo are registered trademarks of KDE e.V..
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries.
All other trademarks and copyrights referred to in this announcement are the property of their respective owners.


Press Contacts

For more information send us an email: press@kde.org