KDE Plasma 5.17 releases: brings many new features and enhancements

by ddos · October 15, 2019

A beta version of KDE Plasma 5.17 has been released today. Some highlights of KDE Plasma 5.17 include:

Do Not Disturb mode is automatically enabled when mirroring screens (e.g. when delivering a presentation)

The Notifications widget now uses an improved icon instead of displaying the number of unread notifications

Improved widget positioning UX, particularly for touch

Improved the Task Manager’s middle-click behavior: middle-clicking on an open app’s task opens a new instance, while middle-clicking on its thumbnail will close that instance

Slight RGB hinting is now the default font rendering mode

Plasma now starts even faster!

Conversion of fractional units into other units (e.g. 3/16″ == 4.76 mm) in KRunner and Kickoff

Wallpaper slideshows can now have user-chosen ordering rather than always being random

New Unsplash picture of the day wallpaper source with categories

Much better support for public WiFi login

Added the ability to set a maximum volume that’s lower than 100%

Pasting text into a sticky note strips the formatting by default

Kickoff’s recent documents section now works with GNOME/GTK apps

Fixed Kickoff tab appearance being broken with vertical panels

System Settings: Thunderbolt, X11 Night Color and Overhauled Interfaces

Night Color settings are now available on X11 too
Thunderbolt device management
Reorganized Appearance settings, consistent sidebars and headers

New settings panel for managing and configuring Thunderbolt devices

The Night Color settings are now available on X11 too. It gets a modernized and redesigned user interface, and the feature can be manually invoked in the settings or with a keyboard shortcut.

Overhauled the user interface for the Displays, Energy, Activities, Boot Splash, Desktop Effects, Screen Locking, Screen Edges, Touch Screen, and Window Behavior settings pages and the SDDM advanced settings tab

Reorganized and renamed some settings pages in the Appearance section

Basic system information is now available through System Settings

Added accessibility feature to move your cursor with the keyboard when using Libinput

You can now apply a user’s font, color scheme, icon theme, and other settings to the SDDM login screen to ensure visual continuity on single-user systems

New ‘sleep for a few hours and then hibernate’ feature

The Colors page now displays the color scheme’s titlebar colors

It is now possible to assign a global keyboard shortcut to turn off the screen

Standardized appearance for list headers

The ‘Automatically switch all running streams when a new output becomes available’ feature now works properly

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