We have been keeping an eye on KDE Plasma 5.24 for a while.
From spotting the GNOME-Style overview effect to the addition of fingerprint support. If you have been following our coverages, you already know about the changes introduced with KDE Plasma 5.24.
Now that KDE Plasma 5.24 stable release is finally here, let me highlight the key additions and improvements below.
KDE Plasma 5.24: What’s New?
KDE Plasma 5.24 is a long-term support release that will receive updates until the final Plasma 5 release (and the transition to Plasma 6).
With this release, you do not get to see massive visual changes, but you can find various functional improvements and subtle visual refinements.
Updates to the Breeze Theme
The breeze theme received some visual tweaks to improve the visual consistency with the Breeze style for apps.
In addition to that, the default Breeze color scheme has been renamed to Breeze Classic to separate it from Breeze Light and Breeze Dark color themes.
The ability to choose accent colors was originally introduced with KDE Plasma 5.23, but now you can select a custom color as well.
Improvements to Notifications
To visually differentiate important notifications, you will notice an orange strip on the side to help them stand out from less urgent messages.
Furthermore, to enhance the user experience, if the notification is about a video/image, the notification displays a thumbnail of the content to give you a visual cue.
Overview Effect
With KDE Plasma 5.24, you finally get to witness the new Overview effect. Note that the feature is still in beta testing.
It lets you easily dabble through multiple desktops and comes disabled out of the box. You will have to head to the System settings → Workspace Behavior → Desktop Effects to enable it under Window Management options and test it out.
You can hold down the Windows/Super key and press the W key to see the overview of all your active windows and virtual desktops.
Improvements to Discover
The software center for KDE i.e “Discover” also received some upgrade including the ability to prevent users from deleting essential packages. It also lets you automatically restart after an update. So, you do not have to wait for an update to complete, to reboot your system.
In addition to that, you can now open locally downloaded Flatpak packages and install it via Discover (the repository should be added automatically as well).
Fingerprint Support in Lock Screen/Login
With Plasma 5.24, fingerprint authentication support has been added. You can add up to 10 fingerprints and use them to unlock the screen or authenticate an action within an app.
Other Improvements
There are several other changes with Plasma 5.24. You can go through the changelog for all technical details.
Some highlights include:
- On-screen keyboard improvements
- The “Plasma Pass” password manager has a modernized design
- Battery and Brightness now turns into just Brightness controls on computers with no batteries
- Improvements to Krunner
- When you drag-and-drop widgets, they now smoothly animate moving to their final position rather than instantly teleporting there
- A new button on the “About this System” page lets you quickly access the Info Center
- The active windows stay in their respective desktop screens even if the screen was turned off or unplugged.
As of now, you can try KDE Plasma 5.24 using KDE Neon, which focuses on providing the latest and greatest KDE packages. Note that it may not be a complete desktop replacement to other popular Linux distributions.
If you want the latest KDE Plasma on your current distribution, you will have to wait until it hits the default repositories.
What do you think about KDE Plasma 5.24? Have you tried it yet? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
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