14 DAY TRIAL // The KDE Project has announced today the general availability of the KDE Plasma 5.17 desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems.
KDE Plasma 5.17 brings numerous new features and enhancements, such as Night Color support on X11, multi-screen and HiDPI improvements, fractional scaling on Wayland, support for managing and configuring Thunderbolt devices in System Settings, much-improved notifications with automatic detection of presentations, as well as Breeze GTK theme support for Google Chrome and Chromium web browsers.
Multiple System Settings pages have been redesigned in KDE Plasma 5.17 to help you configure your KDE Plasma system easier and quicker, System Monitor now displays NVidia GPU stats, the Plasma Discover package manager now shows icons for Snap apps, the Breeze GTK theme now also supports system color schemes for GTK and GNOME apps, and last but not least Plasma now starts even faster.
"Among many other optimizations, start-up scripts have been converted from Bash (a slow, interpreted language) to C++ (a fast, compiled language) and now run asynchronously. This means they can run several tasks simultaneously, instead of having to run them one after another. As a result, the time it takes to get from the login screen to the fully loaded desktop has been reduced significantly," reads today's announcement.
How to update to KDE Plasma 5.17
Other noteworthy changes in the KDE Plasma 5.17 desktop environment include much-improved support for public Wi-Fi logins, better widget editing UX, the ability for KRunner to convert fractions of units into other units, support for striping the formatting of pasted text in sticky notes by default, more configurable desktop background, along with a new picture-of-the-day wallpaper source.
If you're using the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment on your GNU/Linux distribution, you'll be able to update to KDE Plasma 5.17 in the coming days, as soon as the new packages arrive in the stable software repositories. Arch Linux and KDE neon users are among the first to use KDE Plasma 5.17 on their systems, but more popular distros will update to KDE Plasma 5.17 in the coming weeks.
The KDE Plasma 5.17 desktop environment is a short-term supported version that will only receive a total of five maintenance update, starting with the first one, KDE Plasma 5.17.1, which is scheduled for October 22nd, and continuing with KDE Plasma 5.17.2 on October 29th, KDE Plasma 5.17.3 on November 12th, KDE Plasma 5.17.4 on December 3rd, and KDE Plasma 5.17.5 on January 7th, 2020.
