KDE Plasma 5.16 - New Notifications, and a lot of polish all around
1,257KDE 5.16 was released a few days ago, and as always, it brings a lot of enhancements to a already stellar desktop environment. The team is polishing about every corner of the experience, so it's high time we take a look at what's new.
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The desktop
KDE 5.16 comes with a new wallpaper, it looks nice, but nothing too amazing here. The main focus for this new release is actually the notification system: these have been completely redesigned from the ground up. They come with a new do not disturb mode, and notifications are now grouped by application to make it easier to manage them. Important notifications will appear on top of fullscreen windows to make sure you don't miss anything crucial, and notifications for file transfers have also been improved. To compliment this, KDE Plasma now has a whole new settings panel for notifications, which is a lot clearer and usable than the previous iteration, with a lot of advanced options like changing the position they will appear in, and managing how notifications appear depending on their importance.
On top of that, KDE Plasma 5.16 has seen some work in the themes department. THe themes will now be correctly applied to the panels when you select them, and theme designers can customize widgets in depth. Speaking of widgets, all widget settings have been improved to look a bit better and clearer. Some individual widgets have received more attention, such as the color picker, which allows you to drag a color directly from the widget to another application, and the team added the show desktop icon on the panel by default, although whether you see it or not will depend on your distro's implementation of KDE.
The task manager now has more legible context menus, and the team added an option to let you send a window to another virtual desktop by middle clicking its entry in the task manager. When editing a panel, you can select, for widgets that support it, to show alternatives. This will allow you to swap a widget for an equivalent one without messing with the panel layout too much.
In the system tray, KDE 5.16 will add a microphone icon when an application is recording audio. Middle clicking on that icon will mute your mic, and scrolling over it will raise or lower the recording volume.
The Settings
KDE lives for its settings, allowing users to configure almost anything. Most settings pages have been polished, and the main focus has been on the "Appearance section". The Look And Feel page is now on the top level of that category, and icons for many of the settings pages have been revamped to allow users to more easily identify each one. The color schemes and windows decorations pages now use a grid view to show a preview of each color scheme, you can now filter dark and light color schemes from that window, and it also supports drag and drop to install, and undoing the suppression of a specific theme. Applying a color scheme can now be done by double clicking on it, instead of having to go to the Apply button.
The Login screen page now displays more accurate previews for each theme, the wallpaper slideshow settings now display the images in the folders you've selected to be part of the slideshow, and you can pick the ones you want to display or not.
Finally, Plasma 5.16 lets you configure touchpads using the libinput driver, only for those using X11, which should still be the majority of users.
Speaking of X11, a lot of work has also been done on the wayland front. The first support for the proprietary nvidia driver has been added, and you can now drag and drop content from a wayland window to an Xwayland one.
New shortcuts have been added to lock your screen, with Meta + L, and to show or hide the desktop with Meta + D.
As always, the Plasma settings are one of the most complete on any desktop environment on Linux, and seeing some work to make them more user friendly is always welcome, since once complaint Plasma gets often is that the settings are too hard to navigate and locate.
Discover
DIscover is KDE's default software manager, and it's been slightly improved in this release as well. THe new update page now splits apps in two sections, one for the downloading ones, and one for those that are being installed. Once a package is installed, it will disappear from that update page, and you can force quit an installation or an update if you need to.
The "sources" menu that lets you pick where you'll be installing an app from, for example the repositories or flathub, now shows the version number of the app for each source. This will be very handy to pick the source you want to install from, making sure you get the newer or the more stable one.
Finally, the task completion indicator in DIscover looks better with a real progress bar.