Plasma 5.22

Plasma 5.22 is here, and it is more reliable and stable than ever. By cleaning up and refactoring code in the background, the Plasma desktop gives you greater responsiveness and performance, helping you become even more productive without hiccups or surprises. Enjoy a smoother experience with KDE's Plasma 5.22 desktop.

Plasma 5.22 has become more pleasurable to use through improvements to the design and greater smoothness and consistency in transparencies, blurs, icons, and animations. Moving things to accessible locations, offering hints and visual cues, and creating new settings allows you to customize your work environment to make it fit perfectly to your needs. Following the true KDE spirit, the push for a more stable and attractive desktop does not mean you have to renounce control over how you want it to look or behave. Plasma 5.22, as always, packs all the flexibility and tools for customization you have come to expect and love, and some more to boot.

Meanwhile, the push to move Plasma in its entirety to Wayland (the display protocol of the future) continues in full swing. So much so that popular distros are starting to ship Plasma with Wayland by default. By using Wayland behind the scenes, Plasma is able to include features and bug fixes not possible to implement on X11, offering you a better experience and more stability.

Want to know more? Read on to find out what to look forward to in Plasma 5.22:

General Eye Candy & Usability

Developers continue to work on the aesthetics to make using Plasma more pleasurable with every new version. This time around, the big new feature is Adaptive Transparency: This means the panel and panel widgets will usually be pleasantly translucent, but will become entirely opaque if there are any maximized windows, to avoid any visual distractions when you need to focus. You can also make your panel always translucent or always opaque if you want.

Adaptive Transparency

It is this kind of attention to detail that makes Plasma a pleasure to use. Take what happens when you hover over an app's icon in the Task Manager in the panel: a tooltip will appear showing you previews of all the windows that the app has open. This is not new, but now, when you move your cursor over the preview, the window itself will show up in the main work area, giving you a full-sized view of what it contains. As with most things Plasma, you can switch this option off if you find it unhelpful.

We gradually improve the applications which ship with Plasma too, and have transitioned to Plasma System Monitor from the older KSysguard as the default system monitoring app. Now you can keep an eye on what's going on with your apps in the brand new Application view, and more easily customize the app to show anything you want. Likewise, applet and widgets get tweaks and improvements all the time, the Sticky Notes widget, that now allows you to change the size of the text they show.

We gradually improve the applications which ship with Plasma too, and have transitioned to Plasma System Monitor from the older KSysguard as the default system monitoring app. Now you can keep an eye on what's going on with your apps in the brand new Application view, and more easily customize the app to show anything you want. Likewise, applet and widgets get tweaks and improvements all the time, the Sticky Notes widget, that now allows you to change the size of the text they show.

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Offline updates (which ask you to reboot and are then applied while the system is starting) are excellent for when an update could potentially interfere with a running application. That said, some users find them annoying, so System Settings now offers an option to disable them -- or enable them if you are running a distro that has decided to leave them off by default. Open System Settings and navigate to the Software Update page to adjust this service to your liking.

Finally, developers and designers have been hard at work improving the accessibility and keyboard navigability of the settings to make it easier for everyone to make their way around the many options available.

Sistem Tepsisi

Widgets in the System Tray (usually located down in the right-hand corner of the panel) are much more consistent in appearance and are also more useful. Plasma 5.22 introduces a re-designed Digital Clock that not only improves its looks, but also gives you the option of having the date below the time or having it to one side, on the same line, making it easier to read. A related improvement is that the look of the calendar that pops up when you click on the clock has been overhauled, and is now more functional and gives you more information in the same space, while at the same time making it easier on the eyes.

Another upgrade is that you can now select the audio devices' profiles directly from the Audio Volume widget in System Tray. This means, you can switch the audio output from the internal loudspeakers to, say, your TV via HDMI in just three clicks and without having to go through the audio configuration dialog. Just click on the hamburger menu beside the device you want to change and pick Profiles… from the drop down menu.

The Clipboard, where all your copied stuff goes, has become easier to use, as you can now see all its contents by simply pressing Meta [Windows Key] +V.