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The latest release of the KDE Plasma desktop is close with the Plasma 5.24 Beta going live now with plenty of new features and fixes for this customizable environment. A full release is planned for February 8.

Along with a lot of bug fixes, there's plenty of quality of life fixes across the whole desktop. The Breeze theme for example, will now properly respect your choice of accent colours for Folders, the Breeze colour scheme is now called "Breeze Classic" to distinguish from Breeze Light and Breeze Dark and more. The notification system also saw some updates. so that important notifications have a small orange strip to bring more attention to them, notifications about video files now display a thumbnail in the notification and when sending or receiving files via Bluetooth, a system notification is now always shown.

Plenty more modernizations were done across the desktop too like the "Plasma Pass" password manager seeing an updated design, Battery and Brightness now turns into just Brightness controls on computers with no batteries, Media Player correctly shows "nothing playing" when the last playing app is closed and you can easily set your background in the context menu of any image.

For fans of the software installer / updater Discover, you'll be pleased to know this release also includes the recently talked about upgrades to prevent users unintentionally removing their desktop environment too.

Some bigger updates also came towards improving Wayland like support for more than 8-bit colours, DRM Leasing support added for VR headsets, the "Minimize All Windows" widget now works with Wayland, the Spectacle screenshot tool now has access to the "Active Window" mode on Wayland and there's more.

See the release notes for all the info.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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7 comments

dpanter Jan 17, 2022
Nice, I wondered where the 'Active Window' option had gone in Spectacle.
fenglengshun Jan 17, 2022
To be honest, at this point the things stopping me from using Wayland has little to do with the DE's implementation of Wayland itself as much as the apps.

TeamViewer still x11-only means a total no-go from me. But even outside of that, things like input-remapper (formerly key-mapper) which suddenly just breaks on Wayland for my keybind. Also drag-window by dragging from latte-dock panel incorrectly positioning cursor in the middle of the window instead of at the top (making drag to another screen, then maximize it be hassle because the mouse is further down than it's supposed to be).

Apps not working/supported, sudden breakage, and a bunch of papercuts. Was this what Linux was like +5 years ago?
TrainDoc Jan 17, 2022
Does this beta include the root actions in Dolphin? Guessing not since I couldn't find it in the changelog.
buono Jan 17, 2022
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I have been occasionally trying wayland on plasma and found it generally very good, the DRM Leasing support added for VR headsets might be the thing that finally makes me switch.
Nocifer Jan 17, 2022
Quoting: TrainDocDoes this beta include the root actions in Dolphin? Guessing not since I couldn't find it in the changelog.

AFAIK this has to do not with Plasma or even Dolphin, but with the KDE Frameworks; but anyway, it was merged for 5.90 but was deemed a bit too buggy so it was removed and tentatively postponed for 5.91.
elmapul Jan 17, 2022
" support for more than 8-bit colours"
more than 8 per channel i guess? (R,G,B)

" DRM Leasing support added for VR headsets"
you mean Direct Rendering Manager, not Digital rights Management i guess.
Vulphere Jan 19, 2022
Quoting: dpanterNice, I wondered where the 'Active Window' option had gone in Spectacle.

Same, I wondered this (Vulp created a lot of screenshots with active window)

Now we know it will be back soon!
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