14 DAY TRIAL // Today the KDE Project announced the release and general availability of the third stable update to the KDE Plasma 5.10 desktop environment, which was unveiled at the end of May 2017.
The development cycle of the latest KDE Plasma 5 releases is pretty fast these days if you ask us. For example, KDE Plasma 5.10 already received three of its five scheduled maintenance updates in less than a month, including KDE Plasma 5.10.1 and KDE Plasma 5.10.2. The latest arrived today, KDE Plasma 5.10.3, with a total of 36 changes across various components.
These include Plasma Discover, Plasma Workspace, Plasma Desktop, KWin, Plasma Addons, Plasma Audio Volume Control, Powerdevil, plasma-integration, KSSHAskPass, as well as the Breeze and Oxygen themes. We've attached the full changelog if you're curious to know to what exactly was changed, or check some of the highlights below.
"Today KDE releases a Bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.10.3. Plasma 5.10 was released in May with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience. This release adds a two week's worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important," reads the release announcement.
Flatpak backend improved, Mercurial SSH prompts now supported
Among some of the highlights of the KDE Plasma 5.10.3 point release, we can mention that Plasma Discover's new Flatpak backend has been improved to display a pop-up with an error message whenever an update or installation of a Flatpak app fails, Mercurial SSH prompts now supported by KSSHAskPass, and changelogs are now displayed properly in Plasma Discover.
On the other hand, the KWin window manager received support for the GLX_NV_robustness_video_memory_purge OpenGL extension to fix an issue where buffer objects (VBO, FBO) need remapping after switching back from suspend or VT (Virtual Terminal) on Nvidia GPUs, improves resizing of windows on a Wayland display server, and addresses various other issues.
As you can see from the changelog attached below, your KDE Plasma 5.10 desktop should crash less often if you install the new 5.10.3 update, which already hit the stable repositories of Arch Linux and KDE Neon distributions. The next update, KDE Plasma 5.10.4, is expected on July 18, and the last one for the series, KDE Plasma 5.10.5, should land on August 22, 2017, to mark the end of life of KDE Plasma 5.10.