KDE Plasma 5.15 arrives: "light, usable and productive"

KDE Plasma 5.15 is the new major version of the popular desktop environment and the first one launched in 2019, within the KDE objectives for the coming years, focused on "usability and productivity".

"With this in mind, we joined the VDG (Visual Design Group) collaborators to receive comments about the annoying problems in our software, and we managed to guarantee an intuitive and consistent workflow for their daily use", they point out in the official announcement , before giving way to the novelties that this version brings. They highlight changes in configuration interfaces, redesigning icons, improvements in integration with third-party technologies and more.

Plasma Widgets

The first section of the review is focused on the Plasma widgets , the individual components that together constitute the desktop, many of which receive improvements:

• The Bluetooth widget is supported to show the battery of the connected devices, provided that the latest versions of the "upower" and "Bluez" packages are installed.
• New assistant to download desktop background plugins (for example, to put more things apart from images, effects, etc.) directly integrated into the desktop configuration dialog.
• Spacing improvements in the icons on the desktop for better horizontal readability.
• Screen reader support for icons on the desktop.
• Improvements in the spacing and appearance of notifications.
• Cleaning in KRunner to better handle duplicates, whether applications, bookmarks or others.

Configurations

Also, the system preferences section improves, as well as widgets and other configuration modules . The highlight in this case is the homogenization in the arrangement of the options, including icons, buttons and, in general, everything related to the design.

Specific improvements that are mentioned concern the configuration of virtual desktops, the digital clock and the folder views, the effects of the desktop or the blocking screen, which now integrates with the installed Plasma theme. Everything is more orderly and looks more "standardized" in KDE Plasma 5.15.

Multiplatform integration

This "cross-platform integration" contemplates different novelties and for example offers the possibility of, finally, using Snap and Flatpak applications that respect the Plasma configuration , including themes, icons, colors and typographies, according to what is said, without the need to touch anything plus.

Another interesting change is HiDPI support , which now also applies to GTK and GNOME applications; and the same should happen with the light and dark Breeze-GTK themes, which have been refined to avoid inconsistencies.

To finish, it is already possible to use the native window dialogs of the desktop in Firefox , being essential to install a couple of packages ("xdg-desktop-portal" and "xdg-desktop-portal-kde"), in addition to configuring the launcher with special attributes ("GTK_USE_PORTAL = 1" in the file ".desktop"), which is a bit convoluted, although the fault is not the developers of KDE, which quite do, but the well-known and repeated contempt of Mozilla towards the Linux desktop.

Discover

Oh, Discover! The Plasma application store has improved a world only one year to this part, but still suffers from deficiencies in terms of use and design. That is why every new version of the desktop is so welcome in this regard and KDE Plasma 5.15 is no exception.

Discover receives numerous improvements with this version:

• It integrates the option to update the system directly in the system tray widget , similar to how it works in openSUSE, it seems; and will show the option to restart if necessary.
• You can now mark and uncheck specific updates, to install those and not all.
• Management of sources is simplified, in the style of what is stated in the configuration modules; " More practical and useful, especially in distributions based on Ubuntu ".
• The discover function is compatible with the search for Flatpak application extensions.
• Improvement in the installation of local packages, indicating the dependencies in more detail.
• Better organization: applications searches will only show applications, while add-ons should be searched from their own section.

And, again, in general, other small improvements that benefit the operation of Discover, which, as we say a year ago, has improved a lot especially in terms of stability, which was the main thing, and which is slowly refining details 

For the rest, KDE Plasma 5.15 brings improvements of different types related to the management of windows, the support of Wayland, perhaps the technology that is more difficult to integrate, even when the advances are happening without haste but without pause; improvements in the network manager, whose main novelty is the support of WireGuard VPN; and many improvements to the Breeze icons, which are actually part of KDE Frameworks, but their indispensability on the desktop makes them a first-class element. More data in the change list.

In short, KDE Plasma already has a lot in its favor: power, lightness, customization ... So the work done in the latest versions of the desktop, including this one, consists of that mythical movie phrase of "give wax, polish wax ", That is, improving everything that can be improved, which is still very much.

As always, KDE Plasma 5.15 will arrive at one time or another depending on the distribution you use, but if you use KDE neon you just have to update, because it is available from this afternoon.