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.
Its getting better with time.
Quoting: fagnerlnThis 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.
no_information_here Jan 22, 2021
Quoting: fagnerlnThis 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.
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!
Kuduzkehpan Jan 22, 2021
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.
Quoting: Kuduzkehpanİ 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.
Quoting: fagnerlnThis 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.
Luke_Nukem Jan 22, 2021
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