KDE Plasma 5.13 desktop environment released
KDE today announced the KDE Plasma 5.13 desktop environment ushered in the first seven maintenance updates. KDE Plasma 5.13 is the most stable and reliable version of the branch, and today’s statement wrote: “We have spent the last four months optimising startup and minimising memory usage, yielding faster time-to-desktop, better runtime performance and less memory consumption.”
The update mainly includes the following optimizations:
- Plasma Browser Integration is a suite of new features which make Firefox, Chrome and Chromium-based browsers work with your desktop. Downloads are now displayed in the Plasma notification popup just as when transferring files with Dolphin.
- System Settings Redesigns
- New Look for Lock and Login Screens
- Graphics Compositor
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Discover
Discover, our software and addon installer, has more features and sports improvements to the look and feel.
- A tech preview of GTK global menu integration.
- Redesigned Media Player Widget.
- Plasma Calendar plugin for astronomical events, currently showing: lunar phases & astronomical seasons (equinox, solstices).
- xdg-desktop-portal-kde, used to give desktop integration for Flatpak and Snap applications, gained support for screenshot and screencast portals.
- The Digital Clock widget allows copying the current date and time to the clipboard.
- The notification popup has a button to clear the history.
- More KRunner plugins to provide easy access to Konsole profiles and the character picker.
- The Mouse System Settings page has been rewritten for libinput support on X and Wayland.
- Plasma Vault has a new CryFS backend, commands to remotely close open vaults with KDE Connect, offline vaults, a more polished interface and better error reporting.
- A new dialogue pops up when you first plug in an external monitor so you can easily configure how it should be positioned.
- Popups in panel open faster due to a new preloading mechanism.
- Plasma gained the ability to fall back to software rendering if OpenGL drivers unexpectedly fail.
- More…
