14 DAY TRIAL // The KDE Project has announced the public availability of the beta version of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.17 desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems.
KDE Plasma 5.17 promises some really cool new features and enhancements, among which we can mention multi-screen and HiDPI improvements, fractional scaling on Wayland, support for managing and configuring Thunderbolt hardware in System Settings, Night Color support on X11, and much-improved notifications with automatic Do Not Disturb mode for presentations.
Several of the pages in System Settings got redesigned to help you configure your KDE Plasma system easier, the Breeze GTK theme now offers users a better appearance for the Chromium and Google Chrome web browsers and supports system color schemes for GTK and GNOME apps, System Monitor now shows NVidia GPU stats, and Plasma Discover package manager now shows icons for Snap apps.
New "sleep for a few hours and then hibernate" feature
Among other enhancements of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.17 desktop environment, we can mention a new "sleep for a few hours and then hibernate" feature that lets you put your computer in sleep mode for a couple of hours before entering hibernate mode, support for applying custom fonta, color schemes, and icon themes to the SDDM login screen, and much-improved support for public Wi-Fi logins.
Of course, there are numerous other changes coming to the KDE Plasma 5.17 desktop environment this fall, which will be revealed when the final release hits the streets on October 15th. Until then, if you want an early taste of KDE Plasma 5.17, you can download and install the beta version from the software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, but please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, not suitable for production use.
