KDE Plasma 5.27 Released

Long-time Slashdot reader jrepin writes: Plasma is a popular desktop environment, which is also powering the desktop mode on the Steam Deck hand-held gaming console. Today, KDE Community announced release of KDE Plasma 5.27, a Long Term Support (LTS) release and the final release in the Plasma 5 series which is based on Qt 5.

This release brings a welcome wizard, which will guide you through setting up the desktop, and a new tiling system for KWin window manager, allowing you to set up custom tile layouts and resize adjacent tiled windows simultaneously. The settings for touch-enabled devices such as touchscreens and drawing tablets have been improved and expanded. For those lucky owners of Valve's Steam Deck gaming console, Discover can now perform system updates from within the desktop. Digital Clock desktop widget can now show the Hebrew calendar in its calendar view, and the Media Player widget is now touch-sensitive. The Bluetooth widget shows the battery status of connected devices when you hover the cursor over it. Those of you who use multiple monitors should benefit greatly from a major overhaul of how Plasma handles them. KDE Plasma now comes with Flatpak permissions settings integrated into the System Settings app.

For details and other new features and improvements be sure to check out the full announcement.

Wonder if they fixed the Shade issue?

[oldgraybeard]

Where double click on title does not reopen the dialog window to full size. Now the selected windows have to manually resized every time they are selected.

Re:

[StormReaver]

Plasma is full of usability issues. Some of them are minor, and some of them are showstoppers. A more showstopping bug is the one where Alt-Tabbing through windows causes Plasma+KWin to completely lock up. The mouse moves, but that's the only thing that works at that point, alongside switching to virtual terminals.

To fix it, I have to Ctrl+Alt+F2 to get a text console. I then have to "kill -9 plasma-shell" and "kill -9 kwin-x11", in that order. If I kill kwin-x11 first, then the desktop becomes unrecoverabl

Re:

[drinkypoo]

I've seen that happen, but if I thrash around with the mouse and keyboard for a while it unlocks. It hasn't happened actually since I switched from Ubuntu to Devuan, maybe it's a systemd problem somehow :D

Re:

[x_t0ken_407]

I sometimes reload kwin from a text console, worth a try as well IMHO
YMMV:
cat bin/restartkwin
#!/bin/sh
DISPLAY=:1 kwin --replace &

Re-posting this since this works for me whenever kwin crashes (not exactly GP's problem), and parent is AC

Re:

[Antique Geekmeister]

Someone is throwing Shade at Plasma? Color me "surprised". KDE has not been stable since they started trying to be the next Gnome, and the ever-expanding race to clutter our workspace with unwelcome widgets has not slowed.

Re:

[oldgraybeard]

"switching to virtual terminals" works for you? When this happens I usually need to pull the plug on the workstation ;) and lose everything unsaved.

Re:

[aRTeeNLCH]

I'm away from my system, but I thought to relaunch KDE components, it is better or even mandatory to use kquitapp or some such. Otherwise, perhaps you may want to try another option for alt-tabbing, there are various visual ones. You may also have some graphics setup combined with rendering options in KDE that make that happen. Remember, with all options that KDE has, plus all hardware options, you may actually be one of the few with your problem...

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

This works as expected in the version shipping with Debian Bullseye.

Same semantics as MacOS 8's WidowShade.

Re:

[rastos1]

I did not upgrade yet and I have:

System Settings -> section Workspace -> Window Management -> tab Titlebar actions->Double click-> combobox value Maximize

Is the configuration no longer there? Or is it reset to something else? Or it does not work?

Re:

[oldgraybeard]

Changing this from Shade to Maximize disables Shade and then the window size just switches between max and normal for me. So I would say does not work. But thxs for the suggestion.

Re:

[rastos1]

I'm confused. Obviously there can be only one action assigned to the event of double-clicking the window titlebar. If you want to use Shade, there is plenty of other events to which Shade can be assigned. You can also add additional buttons (including button Shade) to the titlebar in System Settings->Appearance->Window Decorations->tab Titlebar buttons.

I love Plasma

[Mononymous]

KDE has been my main desktop environment snice 3.5.6 (Kubuntu Edgy, I think--circa 2007).
The early 4.x releases were a horror show, but mostly Plasma just works.
Choice and configurability are so important to me. I don't leave a whole lot of default settings. No one can compete with Plasma there.
I use it on both Linux and FreeBSD. If it could finally be ported to OpenBSD, I wouldn't use anything else.
I do really miss Konqueror, though.

Re:

[StormReaver]

I do really miss Konqueror, though.

I miss Konqueror, too, and I use it as my main file manager. Some of its most useful features had been either neutered or totally removed when the Dolphin abortion was started. I really, truly, immensely despise Dolphin, and wish it would just swim out to sea and die.

In Kubuntu, at least, Konqueror is just an apt-get away, but is no longer installed by default.

Windows relocated

[whitroth]

I log out at night. I log back in in the morning. I don't know what "automatically saved" means, but
1. the two (side by side)urxvt terms in the upper right come up *behind* firefox, in the upper left. And anything that was minimized (a pic, for example) is back on the screen, instead of minumized. Never had this issue in CentOS (5,6,7), didn't have it when I went to kubuntu, but I come to almalinux 9.1, and annoyance.

2. log out and log in about every other time, take a *while* - like a minute or more.

Here'

pet peeve: virtual desktops with individual backdr

[aRTeeNLCH]

Have they brought back individual backdrops on virtual desktops? No, the same cannot be achieved with activities, and no, activities make no sense to me, and no one has been able to explain the advantage of activities - they seem an invention of someone who never used virtual desktops and wanted something different... Otherwise, KDE has the most options that I require from a desktop system, and I'd really hate to have to use Windows without kde-mover-sizer...