The System Settings app has been redesigned

May 18, 2018 15:58 GMT  ·  By

The KDE Project announced today that its upcoming KDE Plasma 5.13 desktop environment is now available for beta testing, giving us a glimpse of what to expect from the final release next month.

With a focus on making the KDE Plasma desktop environment faster and more lightweight than ever, the KDE Project is releasing today the KDE Plasma 5.13 desktop environment in a beta form that everyone can test on their favorite GNU/Linux distribution for an early taste of the new features and improvements, which include Plasma Browser Integration, redesigned System Settings, new lock & login screens, Plasma Discover enhancements, and more.

"Members of the Plasma team have been working hard to continue making Plasma a lightweight and responsive desktop which loads and runs quickly, but remains full-featured with a polished look and feel. We have spent the last four months optimizing startup and minimizing memory usage, yielding faster time-to-desktop, better runtime performance and less memory consumption," reads today's announcement.

Here's what's new in KDE Plasma 5.13

Highlights of the KDE Plasma 5.13 desktop environment include the implementation of the Plasma Browser Integration feature that promises to enable non-KDE web browsers to better integrate with the Plasma desktop to display downloads in the notification popup, multimedia controls in the Media Controls Plasmoid to skip or mute videos and music, or the ability to send links to your phone. Plasma Browser Integration supports Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, and other Chromium-based browsers.

New lock and login screens have been implemented in KDE Plasma 5.13 as well, giving users a more enjoyable and informative login & lock experience. Also redesigned in the System Settings app, which now features revamped theming, splash screen, mouse, and fonts pages to make customizing your KDE Plasma desktop environment easier. Plasma's KWin window manager received much-improved effects for desktop switching and blur, and the Plasma Discover graphical package manager gained improved support for Snaps.

KDE Plasma 5.13 also revamps the Media Player widget, better integrates the Flatpak and Snap universal apps into the Plasma desktop to enable support for screencast and screenshot portals, adds a new CryFS backend, support for offline vaults, and the ability to remotely close open vaults to Plasma Vault, improves the Digital Clock widget and KRunner plugin, adds a new Plasma Calendar plugin for astronomical events, as well as a tech preview of the GTK global menu integration.

Of course, there are numerous other smaller, yet important changes coming to the KDE Plasma 5.13 desktop environment, including a new dialog pop-up that will be displayed when the user first plugs in an external monitor for easy configuration on how it should be positioned, and a "Clear history" button on the notification popup. KDE Plasma 5.13 will also be able to fallback to software rendering when no OpenGL drivers are present or they fail to load. The final KDE Plasma 5.13 release is expected on June 12, 2018.

New lock screen
New lock screen
New login screen
New login screen
Redsigned System Settings
Redsigned System Settings

Developing story...

KDE Plasma 5.13 Beta (13 Images)

KDE Plasma 5.13 Beta
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