Plasma, the desktop environment from the KDE team has a big new upgrade coming with the release of Plasma 5.21 Beta and it's looking to be a thing of beauty.
Their current aim with Plasma 5.21 is to finely polish the experience overall, with the KDE team saying it pulls in "many improvements into Plasma’s design, utilities and themes, with the aim of providing end users with a more pleasant and accessible environment".
Plasma 5.21 will bring with it a redesigned application launcher, theme improvements, a brand new UI for the Plasma System Monitor, Plasma Firewall settings added to the overall system settings to let you configure both UFW and firewalld, plenty of UI cleaning done on system settings and much more.
It's big in many areas, not just design tweaks, with a big plan in progress to have KDE push for first-class Wayland support with KWin. They say that Plasma 5.21 "makes great headway to reach that goal". KWin, the compositor, has been "extensively refactored" and so you should see reduced latency throughout the entire stack.
Also available are mixed refresh rate setups with Wayland and Plasma 5.21. So now you can have one set at 144HZ and another at 60Hz and things won't bug out on you, and they say that early support for "multiple GPUs was also added on Wayland". Other Wayland interactions got improved too like virtual keyboard supporting GTK apps, along with many other Plasma components and KDE apps being more ready for Wayland.
Love a mix of dark and light themes? They have you covered there too with the introduction of Breeze Twilight as an official theme. It will give a dark theme for Plasma directly while mixing in light styles for applications. I must admit, it does look pretty good in they shot they showed off:
See the release announcement here.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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This twilight theme is really beautiful! KDE breaks a bit too much IMO, but I'm for sure will try this with Wayland
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Man, I love KDE.
Its getting better with time.
Its getting better with time.
3 Likes, Who?
Always nice to see more DE Prioritizing wayland, and now I heard wlroots will start to make a compositor entirely based on Wayland + Vulkan, which I hope will be the standard in some years.
2 Likes, Who?
This twilight theme is really beautiful!Indeed
And the best thing is that we can go into settings and tweak to our liking. Particularly fonts: I like to have my blacks #000000 and whites #ffffff; with plasma that's only a few clicks away.
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no_information_here Jan 22, 2021
This twilight theme is really beautiful! KDE breaks a bit too much IMO, but I'm for sure will try this with Wayland
I am curious, which things break for you? I run the stable Plasma 5.18 that comes with KDE Neon LTS and it seems pretty solid to me.
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I still haven't quite figured out what causes my menus/drop downs to instantly disappear the moment I click them, but still have their options selectable if I click on the right empty space, in every Qt5 app running under Plasma on Wayland. (totally fine under Xorg) I even switched to building from master/head for the KDE part, but I'm suspecting this is a config/driver thing (Radeon RX 580) or a Qt5 thing.
The joys of running Gentoo, I guess. ;p I'll either find a Qt5 upstream ebuild overlay (i.e. a -9999) and try that or just wait and see. Other than that, though, Wayland support is looking solid!
The joys of running Gentoo, I guess. ;p I'll either find a Qt5 upstream ebuild overlay (i.e. a -9999) and try that or just wait and see. Other than that, though, Wayland support is looking solid!
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Kuduzkehpan Jan 22, 2021
İ hope one day ubuntu devs make kde standart DE in Ubuntu
until then im good with kde neon.
And i love kde as its faster and beautiful than gnome and yes u can put an any icon on desktop with full functionality without any coding or de crash.
until then im good with kde neon.
And i love kde as its faster and beautiful than gnome and yes u can put an any icon on desktop with full functionality without any coding or de crash.
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İ hope one day ubuntu devs make kde standart DE in UbuntuJust checking that you're aware Kubuntu exists. :)
until then im good with kde neon.
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This twilight theme is really beautiful! KDE breaks a bit too much IMO, but I'm for sure will try this with Wayland
Way too many times after updating packages my KDE will break in all sorts of fun ways. I've had this issue for years with every KDE distro and is a bad user experience.
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Luke_Nukem Jan 22, 2021
"multiple GPUs was also added on Wayland" does this mean that an laptop display could run on say AMD/Intel igpu, and externals on a dGPU?
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TheRiddick Jan 23, 2021
what happens when you install things like skype? does it screw up the task manager click zone still? bet it does.
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What I never like with KDE and their app is how bloated they are. You can't install KDE without it coming with everything, and you can't install one kde soft on a another DE without them installing half of kde.
I really love a lot of kde softwares, but now I tend to use a less interesting alternative because I don't want all that bloat. For example, Okular is my favourite PDF reader, but it loads so much.
Last edited by DerpFox on 23 January 2021 at 2:36 am UTC
I really love a lot of kde softwares, but now I tend to use a less interesting alternative because I don't want all that bloat. For example, Okular is my favourite PDF reader, but it loads so much.
Last edited by DerpFox on 23 January 2021 at 2:36 am UTC
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TheRiddick Jan 23, 2021
What I never like with KDE and their app is how bloated they are.
You can remove allot of KDE components, are you talking about System Settings? You don't like all the options in there?
KDE Plasma5 is actually less bloat then quite a few others these days, in the sense it runs better and more coherent.
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what happens when you install things like skype? does it screw up the task manager click zone still? bet it does.
While I'm not exactly sure what you mean... I can't say I've experienced anything too weird with Skype, personally.
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TheRiddick Jan 23, 2021
While I'm not exactly sure what you mean... I can't say I've experienced anything too weird with Skype, personally.
Skype taskbar click zone ends up being invisibly on top of the application start menu button, on my screen that is top-left, might follow the issue bottom-left if that is where you have the bar.
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What I never like with KDE and their app is how bloated they are. You can't install KDE without it coming with everything, and you can't install one kde soft on a another DE without them installing half of kde.In a time when a full Linux install including all the major DEs is smaller than one sizable game, I find it hard to take bloat worries very seriously.
I really love a lot of kde softwares, but now I tend to use a less interesting alternative because I don't want all that bloat. For example, Okular is my favourite PDF reader, but it loads so much.
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slaapliedje Jan 23, 2021
I don't mean to troll for sure, and as I haven't used KDE for more than a 'oh, it still requires me to search online how to set things the way I like them to be' it kind of amazes me that they only just added different refresh rates for monitors.
Granted on the one hand, it's kind of annoying when you have two identical monitors that you have to set both of them to the desired setting, but that's how Gnome has done it for quite a few releases. Or is the different refresh rates just on Wayland and Xorg had it before?
Granted on the one hand, it's kind of annoying when you have two identical monitors that you have to set both of them to the desired setting, but that's how Gnome has done it for quite a few releases. Or is the different refresh rates just on Wayland and Xorg had it before?
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You can't install KDE without it coming with everything, and you can't install one KDE soft on a another DE without them installing half of KDE.
If you have a system without any GTK libraries installed (which will be true with very few distros) and you want to install one GNOME app it will also pull in a sizeable number of dependencies.
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This twilight theme is really beautiful! KDE breaks a bit too much IMO, but I'm for sure will try this with Wayland
I am curious, which things break for you? I run the stable Plasma 5.18 that comes with KDE Neon LTS and it seems pretty solid to me.
I had issues with Dolphin, I had a folder that crashes it, I don't know why, Nautilus, Nemo and Thunar opens it without problem. Had issues with baloo, sometimes works, but sometimes simply don't find anything and I had to recreate the database to maybe work. Discover which is IMO a bad joke as Gnome Software. And the most annoying is the theme support, Breeze is ok, but if change anything, it will appear some bug, mostly on GTK apps. Now with a nice default theme, I think that it will fix this problem.
I used it on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, which is a rolling distro, maybe I had some bad luck, but I had problems with Baloo, Discover and with themes on it. After this I tried Kubuntu 19.10, it feels more stable, Baloo worked, Discover worked (but, argh...), but I've encountered bugs with Dolphin and again with themes.
I feel more comfortable with GTK, but for sure KDE has a lot of potential. To me XFCE is by far the best DE, it's stable and more customizable than the majority of DEs. But the problem is the slow development, I think that Wayland is a game changer, who knows when they will start to work with...
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