Guest post by Today the KDE Community releases Plasma 5.24, a Long Term Support (LTS) release that will receive updates and bugfixes until the final Plasma 5 version, before we transition to Plasma 6.
This new Plasma release focuses on smoothing out wrinkles, evolving the design, and improving the overall feel and usability of the environment.
Highlights for this release include: a new overview effect for managing all your desktops and application windows (similar to the overview in GNOME), easy discovery of KRunner features with the help assistant, and unlocking screen and authentication using fingerprint reader. You will also notice a new Honeywave wallpaper, the ability to pick any color for UI accents, and critically important Plasma notifications now come with an orange strip on the side to visually distinguish them from less urgent messages.
I have just given it a go on a virtual machine, I haven’t used KDE before, I installed Kubuntu then this new Plasma 5.24.
One thing that stands out is that it feels quite quick even on a virtual machine. It looks good too, I might set aside a partition later and do a proper install. I don’t know why I didn’t try it sooner.
Been using KDE for a while now and it’s stable, has all the features i expect from a desktop environment and in addition to that if i want to apply some custom behavior. That is more or less a click away. I don’t have to install some add-on for it to work. Like lets say enabling wobbly windows. Things like hiding the window decorations, when for example using Firefox. By right clicking on title bar and selecting such option. Beautiful. It really shows that KDE has a rich tradition of being a desktop oriented environment. Just what we need in 2022, where a lot of similar projects decided we don’t need that anymore.
Works wonderfully. Wayland as a daily driver in 2022 🙂
I booted up my install of Arch, updated everything… was using gparted to resize disk partitions for my Debian install in KDE Plasma 5.24… screen locked of course… then the next morning the lock screen had crashed and I was forced to reboot! Fortunately the disk resize finished… I need to figure out wtf happened with that…
I installed Kubuntu 21.10 on an old laptop the other day, after 10 years of not bothing to use Linux.
I was very impressed on how fast and smooth KDE is and Wayland. It’s brought back from the dead, what was an old laptop.