The KDE team has released Plasma 5.21, and this is one hell of a release. They’ve paid a lot of attention to presentation for this release, with visual improvements in both first and third party applications, including a new main menu (the old menu, as well as the basic cascading menu, are of course still available if you want them).
On the application front, Plasma 5.21 introduces the System Monitor, a brand new resource and task manager that gives you all the information you’d ever need on your running system – and in true KDE fashion, it includes the ability to create your own personalised pages with just the information you need.
Another big focus was Wayland:
We have extensively refactored the compositing code in KWin and the changes should reduce latency throughout all compositing operations. We have also added a control in the compositing settings so you can choose whether you prefer lower latency or smoother animations.
In addition, we have also added support for mixed-refresh-rate display setups on Wayland, e.g. you can have one screen refreshing at 144Hz and another at 60Hz, which is ideal for improving work-stations with multiple monitors. Preliminary support for multiple GPUs was also added on Wayland.
There’s much more in this release, and I’m excited to try it out.
I’m enjoying this update quite a bit. The new menu takes some getting used to, and I’m not sure if I’ll switch back to the old one yet. But Wayland has been working very well for me. I haven’t yet tried 5.21 on my laptop with the Nvidia card.
That new menu didn’t last long for me :-D. Also, I can’t find an option to change the font dpi on Wayland – something I find myself having to do on all DE’s and *nix distributions. Other than it’s pretty sweet.
been using it since released: working awesomly.
The timing for 5.21.1 was also very good: after one week of the release a lot of fixes