As previously promised, KDE indeed delivered Plasma 5.10 towards the end of May, more precisely, towards the very end of May (30th).
The release brings a host of changes many users would be delighted to receive. As most of these changes were already introduced in Plasma 5.10 Upcoming Features Published this post therefore shall focus on the features that weren’t mentioned before.
New in Plasma 5.10
- The list of applications in the panel, known as Task Manager, has gained options for middle mouse click actions such as grouping and ungrouping applications.
- Better integration of icons in vertical panel mode.
- Improved app identification and pinning in Task Manager.
- Spring Loading, i.e. the opening of a window preview upon hover (see video below), in Folder View making drag and drop of files powerful and quick.
- Massively improved performance in Folder View for initial listing and scrolling large folders, reduced memory usage.
- Ability to resize widgets in the desktop by dragging on their edges and moving them with Alt+left-click, just like regular windows has been added.
- Improved window manager support for hung processes: non responding windows gets darkened to indicate that one cannot interact with them any more.
- A new System Settings module lets you download and select boot time splashes – requires Plymouth tool to be installed in order to work.
The Wayland Frontier
More strides have been made to bring Wayland (an alternative display manager to Xorg) to the fore, however as of current, KDE still don’t recommend users in general to make the move.
Nonetheless Plasma 5.10 introduces the following Wayland improvements:
- KWin now supports scaling displays by different levels if you have a HiDPI monitor and a normal DPI screen.
- Keyboard layout support in Wayland now has all the features of X11.
Preparing For Flatpak & Snappy
Bundle packages, packages that comes in a bundle with their dependencies such as Flatpak and Snappy, got experimental support in Plasma 5.10 preparing for the day they’ll become more mainstream as the projects grow.
More specifically; Discover software center has gained provisional backends for Flatpak and Snappy. New plugin xdg-desktop-portal-kde has added KDE integration into Flatpak packaged applications.
