KDE Plasma is one of the most beautiful Linux desktop environments out there. With its highly customizable settings and good performance, the Plasma desktop provides a great Linux experience.
The KDE Plasma 5.21 was released last month and the release came with a lot of exciting improvements. The development team is also actively working on the next release i.e. KDE Plasma 5.22. Recently, some exciting details surfaced through a blog post by one of the developers.
Let’s have a detailed look at the upcoming features along with other improvements in KDE Plasma 5.22.
Adaptive Panel Opacity in KDE Plasma 5.22
It looks like you might finally see “Adaptive Panel Opacity” as a big addition that will be pushed with KDE Plasma 5.22.
This feature will make your panel and panel applets more transparent. There will be three options available in the settings under opacity; Adaptive, Opaque, and Transparent. So, you get to control the level of transparency.
The adaptive panel will make your panel and panel applets fully opaque when you maximize any window. This will give a uniform look to your panel and the maximized window. However, if you don’t want your panel to become opaque or transparent when you maximize and minimize windows, you can choose the other two options.
You can also easily add this to your theme by enabling adaptive transparency in your metadata file.
Do note that this is available for maximized windows for now. It will also be supported for tiled windows soon.
Other Improvements in KDE Plasma 5.22
QML-based apps are made fully responsive to your animation duration settings.
Also, while your screen is off, the system will not waste any CPU or GPU power drawing un-rendered components.
Some of the KDE apps have also received some new features and bug fixes. For instance – with Kate text editor, you can now preserve and restore unsaved files or unsaved changes in files when you relaunch the program after quitting. That’s definitely handy!
This feature is available in Kate 21.04. You can test this feature by enabling the checkboxes under Automatically save and restore: in settings > sessions.
Personally, I also like the addition of icons in the “Discover” app that quickly helps you identify the type of package available for an app (like Flatpak, Snap.)
In addition to these updates, you will find several performance and user interface improvements.
If you want to know more about the new features and bug fixes in KDE Plasma 5.22, please read the recent blog post by one of the developers.
Try KDE Plasma 5.22
KDE Plasma is currently under active development and if you are interested in helping the developers by testing and reporting bugs, you can install the Testing Edition of KDE Neon.
Since this version is under development, many things can change.
What do you think about these improvements in KDE Plasma 5.22? Let me know in the comments below.
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