14 DAY TRIAL // The KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop environment arrived last week, on July 5, and it has already landed in the main software repositories of various GNU/Linux operating systems, including Arch Linux, Gentoo, and KDE Neon.
KDE Plasma 5.7 brought numerous new features and improvements, along with the usual bug fixes, and it also promised improved multi-screen support. However, it appears that, for many users who have already tried the new KDE Plasma desktop on their distributions, multi-screen support fails to work as expected.
KDE developer Martin Gräßlin writes today, July 11, 2016, on his personal blog about this fact, trying to explain to those who reported issues with KDE Plasma 5.7 running on multi-screen setups that they are working very hard to fix the bugs, but sometimes things do not depend entirely on them.
"This is unfortunate, and our users have all the reasons to be disappointed with us. We are working very hard to fix the issues which have been reported to us since the release," said Martin Gräßlin. "But there are many situations where users blame us for issues not under our control."
KDE Plasma 5.7.1 bugfix release coming July 12
If you are one of those users who have encountered issues with KDE Plasma 5.7 on multi-screen configurations, we recommend that you read Mr. Gräßlin's lengthy blog post in full so that you can better understand some of the issues reported by users and why they happen. Among these, we can mention broken display hardware key, windows displayed on the wrong screen, Skype notification window not visible, and much more.
While some of these multi-screen bugs will be fixed in the upcoming maintenance updates for KDE Plasma 5.7, some work could be delayed, for various reasons explained in the respective blog post. However, if it's comforting at all, KDE Plasma 5.7 will get its first point release tomorrow, July 12, 2016, as the KDE Plasma 5.7.1 version, which is a recommended update for all KDE Plasma desktop users.