KDE Plasma 5.17 a fully equipped long-awaited improvements and great new features, as hundreds of thousands of users expect each update.
For example, Plasma 5.17 boasts a built-in function “night mode” (called “night colour scheme”), which helps to protect eyes from blue light.
This feature, which previously was available in Wayland, but is now supported in X11, because it exists in all major operating systems, including Ubuntu, MacOS and Windows 10.
Plasma 5.17 also includes support fractional scaling for the Plasma Desktop to Wayland. This feature is currently experimental option in GNOME Shell changes the window size and UI elements to gracefully “fit” for HiDPI displays.
In other developments, KDE has improved the startup time of Plasma, by converting many Bash scripts in C++, forcing them to load asynchronously (doing multiple tasks at once, not individually).
As a result of these changes “the time required to transition from login screen to fully loaded desktop was considerably reduced”, according to KDE.
Other notable improvements in KDE Plasma 5.17 include:
- The mode of “Presentation” in the notification center
- Improved UI changes to the widgets
- Added the function to press the middle mouse button in task Manager
- KRunner learned how to convert units of measurement
- Turn off background source in the Wallpaper settings
- Improved panel “Settings”
- Configuration support Thunderbird
- Improve Breeze GTK theme
- Improvements in the app center Discover
Where to download KDE Plasma 5.17
You can download KDE Plasma 5.17 as the source code of KDE and boot image is available for testing.
19.10 Kubuntu users can upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.17 using the Kubuntu backports PPA (although for build and release of required packages often require several days since the release).
Users of distributions such as Arch and Manjaro, as well as the relevant versions of KDE Neon, you can count on update Plasma 5.17 in the coming days.
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