14 DAY TRIAL // The KDE Project announced today the release and general availability of the fifth and last maintenance update to the latest KDE Plasma 5.17 desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems.
Coming about a month after version 5.17.4, the KDE Plasma 5.17.5 point release is here to add a month's worth of bug fixes and translation updates in an attempt to make the KDE Plasma 5.17 desktop environment more stable and reliable for everyone. According to the official changelog, it includes 32 changes.
Highlights include a fix for a KDecoration crash in System Settings, revert of the "[sddm-theme] Fix initial focus after SDDM QQC2 Port" change from previous releases, a fix for a regression in "Port the pager applet away from QtWidgets," and a fix for a regression in temperature size with short panels in the Weather applet.
Moreover, KDE Plasma 5.17.5 adds item spacing to size hint in the Breeze theme, fixes division by zero in Night Color, speeds up sending requests to ksysguardd, replaces missing icon in the Milou applet, addresses a crash that occurred when changing advanced IPv4 configuration, and reverts the "Add Meta+Space as a default shortcut to activate KRunner" change.
KDE Plasma 5.17 reaches end of life
The KDE Plasma 5.17.5 release also marks the end of life of the KDE Plasma 5.17 desktop environment series, which means that no further updates will be published. All users are encouraged to update their KDE Plasma 5.17 installations to version 5.17.5 as soon as the packages are available from the stable software repositories of their favorite GNU/Linux distributions.
The next major version, KDE Plasma 5.18, is currently in development and it's expected to enter beta testing next week on January 16th. The final release of the KDE Plasma 5.18 desktop environment, which will be an LTS (Long Term Support) series, should hit the streets early next month on February 11th, 2020.