14 DAY TRIAL // KDE today announced the general availability of the KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions, a major release that adds improvements to several components, but also introduces a couple of new features.
KDE Plasma 5.11 has been in development for the past several months, and it was offered as a Beta since mid-September, allowing early adopters to its new features and enhancements, starting with the redesign of the System Settings app, which makes it easier to access common settings, and continuing with Plasma Vault, a secure storage app that lets users store sensitive information in encrypted vaults.
"For users who often deal with sensitive, confidential and private information, the new Plasma Vault offers strong encryption features presented in a user-friendly way," reads today's announcement. "Plasma Vault allows to lock and encrypt sets of documents and hide them from prying eyes even when the user is logged in. These 'vaults' can be decrypted and opened easily."
Task Manager and Wayland improvements, notification history
KDE's ongoing effort to modernize the notification system in the KDE Plasma desktop environment continues in this release with the implementation of notification history. This means that Plasma's notification feature will now show missed or expired system notifications if the user enables support. On top of that, KDE Plasma 5.11 brings more improvements to the Task Mananger, Folder View, and App Launcher Menu.
Lastly, KDE Plasma 5.11 also plays well with the next-generation Wayland display server as it adds an extra layer of improvements and new features. Among these, we can mention smoother graphics, support for the KWin window and composite manager to automatically apply scaling based on a screen's pixel density, thus improving support for multi-monitor configurations, as well as support for the ConsoleKit 2 framework.
KDE Plasma 5.11 is available for download today for GNU/Linux distro maintainers who want to ship it by default or as an alternative to their upcoming releases. This means that users will be able to update their KDE Plasma 5.10 desktops to version 5.11 in the coming weeks, most probably with the first point release, KDE Plasma 5.11.1, due on October 17. KDE Plasma 5.11 will receive a total of five maintenance updates, the last one, KDE Plasma 5.11.5, arriving January 2, 2018.
