KDE Plasma 5.15 is the new large version of the popular desktop environment and the first to be launched in 2019, within the KDE objectives for the coming years, is focused as they say in "usability and productivity . "
" With this in mind, we joined the VDG (Visual Design Group) partners to get comments on the annoying issues in our software and we managed to guarantee an intuitive and consistent workflow for its daily use, "they point out. official announcement, before making room for the news that this version provides. They highlight changes in configuration interface, icon redesign, integration with third-party technologies, and more.
Plasma Widgets
The first part of the review focuses on widgets Plasma, the individual components that together make up the desktop, many of which receive improvements:
- Bluetooth widget receives support for displaying the battery for connected devices, provided that the latest versions of the packages "upower" and "bluez" have been installed.
- New assistant to download plugins from the desktop background (for example, to add more things than images, effects, etc.) directly integrated into the desktop configuration dialog.
- Improvements in the distance in the icons on the desktop for better horizontal readability.
- Printer Reader Support
- Cleaning in KRunner to better manage duplicates, regardless of applications, bookmarks or others.
- Improvements to the distance and appearance of messages. Bluetooth battery "width =" 456 "height =" 416 "srcset =" https://www.muylinux.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/bluetooth-battery.jpg 456w, https: // www. verlinux.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/bluetooth-battery-171×156.jpg 171w "sizes =" (max width: 456px) 100vw, 456px "/>
Bluetooth
Configurations
In addition, the system preferences section, as well as the configuration modules for widgets and others.The most prominent in this case is the homogenization in the options, including icons, buttons and generally everything related to the design.
Concrete improvements as mentions the configuration of virtual desktops, digital clocks and folder displays, desktop effects or lock screens, which are now integrated with the installed plasma mathematics. Everything is more ordered and looks more "standardized" in KDE Plasma 5.15
Integration of cross platform
This " platform integration "contemplates various news and offers, for example, the ability to finally use Snap applications and Flatpak that respect configurations n of Plasma including themes, icons, colors and styles, is said without having to touch anything else.
Another interesting change is HiDPI support which now also applies to GTK and GNOME applications; and the same should happen with the bright and dark Breeze GTK themes that have been debugged to avoid inconsistencies.
Finally, it is already possible to use built-in window dialogs on the Firefox desktop needed to install a few packages ("xdg desktop portal" and "xdg desktop portal kde"), except configuring the startup program with special attributes ("GTK_USE_PORTAL = 1" in the ".desktop" file), which is a bit crowded, although the bug is not the developers of KDE, but it is well known and repeatedly despised on the Mozilla Linux desktop.
Firefox
Discover
Oh, Discover! The Plasma Company The Plasma Application Store has improved a world just one year into this part, but still suffers from deficiencies in use and design. That's why every new version of the desktop is so welcome in this respect and KDE Plasma 5.15 is no exception.
Discover receives many improvements with this version:
- Integrates the option to update the system directly into widget in the system tray, similar to how it works in openSUSE, it seems;
- You can now select and deselect specific updates, to install them and not all.
- Source management is simplified according to what is exposed in the configuration modules. " more convenient and useful, especially in Ubuntu-based distributions ."
- The discovery feature is compatible with the search for Flatpak applications.
- Improved installation of local packages indicating dependencies in more detail.
- Better organization: Application searches only show applications, while extensions should be searched from their own section.
And again, usually other small improvements that favor the operation of Discover, which, as we say a year now, have improved a lot, especially when it comes to stability, which was the main problem and slowly refining details.
In short, KDE Plasma already has a lot to their advantage: power, brightness, adaptation … So the work done in the latest versions of the desktop, including this one, consists of the mythical film "Wax, Polish Wax" ", that is, improving everything that can be improved, which is still a lot.
As always, KDE Plasma 5.15 will come once or another depending on the distribution used, but if you use KDE neon you only need to update, as it is available since this afternoon.
