Plasma 5.24

Notifications

To make critically important Plasma notifications stand out, they now come with an orange strip on the side to visually distinguish them from less urgent messages. Meanwhile, we have improved the contrast and visibility of the header and title labels in all notifications to make them easier to read.

Another visual enhancement is that notifications about video files now display a thumbnail of the video in the notification itself, just like for image files.

System Tray and Widgets

Many widgets have received new features and subtle enhancements that improve their looks, the relevance of their information, and ease of navigating them. For example, we have added a Date always below time option for the Digital Clock. The Weather widget asks you to configure it when you add it for the first time to the tray, and now automatically searches through all available weather sources. The Battery & Brightness widget has been made clearer and now shows a more accurate title and icon for computers with no batteries. The new versions of the Clipboard and Network widgets can now be navigated with just your keyboard.

任务管理器

When you hover the cursor above a Task Manager item, the window thumbnail tooltip that pops up is now significantly faster to load, and display a volume slider for windows playing audio.

The Task Manager's context menus have been clarified and simplified. Start New Instance, for example, is now Open New Window and no longer appears for apps marked as having a single main window. Meanwhile, the More Actions item has been moved to the bottom of the menu and changed to just More.

系统设置

Version after version, KDE developers and designers work to make System Settings easier and faster to use. You can see the progress and attention to detail in such small things as System Settings' own settings: there were so few options that developers have moved them to the hamburger menu that you can see next to the Search text box, preventing the need to clutter up your workspace with another window.

If you are using Plasma in a language other than English, we also have you covered. You can use the Search field to find terms both in your language and English without having to switch from one to the other, just in case it has not been translated yet or you are more familiar with the English term. The Add a keyboard layout dialog has been redesigned for simplicity and ease of use.

Other design and usability improvements have been added to Night Color, the speaker test sheet in System Settings' Audio page, and the battery charge limit feature. For people wanting to fine-tune their monitors, the Display & Monitor section now shows the scale factor used for each screen as well as their proper physical resolution.

For your convenience, when you enable auto-login, you now get a warning about some changes you might want to make to your KWallet setup for optimal usability.

Discover

Discover now gives you the option to automatically restart after an update has completed. Simply click the checkbox at the bottom of the Updates page, grab a caffeinated beverage, and go enjoy a break. By the time you return, Plasma will have rebooted into the brand new updated system.

We have also added a mobile mode for when you use it on a phone: If it is on a wide screen, its home page will show a two-column card view. Open it on a phone and it will show a bottom tab bar in narrow/mobile mode.

Other improvements are that checking for updates is much faster, and the Update page is now less overwhelming, with a nicer design to select updates. Additionally, it tells you the source of the updates.

Speaking of which... Discover has supported Flatpaks for quite some time, but now locally downloaded Flatpak packages can be opened and installed with Discover, and their repositories automatically get added to your system.

Discover also tries to be smarter and friendlier and helps with suggestions if it can't find exactly what you are looking for. Installation error messages are also more user-friendly and come with a new Report a problem link at the bottom of each description page. If you have a problem with an update, click the link and it takes you straight to the bug tracker page for your operating system. Developers have also included a new safety measure in Discover that stops you from uninstalling your Plasma desktop by mistake.

KRunner

KRunner can already find documents and web pages, run commands, convert units and currencies, give you definitions of words, do high level math — and new features are being added with plugins all the time. It can be hard to keep up with everything it can do! But now it's easy to become a KRunner whiz: click on the question mark icon on the toolbar and KRunner will show a list of available plugins and how to use them. Click on a plugin from the list and you'll see all the information you need to use it to its fullest.

Login/Lock Screen

Fingerprint authentication is now incorporated into Plasma. You can also enroll up to 10 fingerprints and use them to unlock the screen, provide authentication when an app asks for your password, and also authenticate you when you need to run a command with sudofrom the command line.

Speaking of the lock screen, now you can put your machine to sleep or hibernate it from the lock screen without having to unlock it first.