A big update for the venerable KDE desktop.
Everyday utilities and tools, such as the Panels, Task Manager, Notifications and System Settings, have all been overhauled to make them more usable, efficient, and friendlier.
Meanwhile, developers are hard at work adapting Plasma and all its bits and pieces to Wayland. Once done, Plasma will not only be readier for the future, but will also work better with touchscreens and multiple screens with different refresh rates and DPIs. Plasma will also offer better support for hardware-accelerated graphics, be more secure, and enjoy many more advantages. Although still work in progress, 5.20 already offers users many of the benefits of Plasma on Wayland.
This is a substantial release that’s pretty much a must for every KDE user. I can’t wait until Wayland can truly be used as the default, and I feel that moment is actually quite, quite close now.
I do love me some KDE. Wayland still has some rough edges (the new application preview doesn’t work in Wayland for apps running on xwayland – at least that appears to be the reason) but it is, indeed, mostly usable in KDE now.
Hands down the best open source desktop available, albeit with MATE a close second, even though it has no Wayland support in sight.
Yet Wayland has not remote execution. Now I am teleworking with RDP in Windows. Wayland would make a future change to Linux impossible.
“…the Klipper clipboard utility and middle-click paste are now fully operational on Wayland”
Middle-click paste! Wayland’s ready for me now 😀
Seroiusly, an impressive list of new features, if AlienBOB doesn’t keep providing Plasma for Slackware -current I’ll have to try compiling ot for myself!
BTW, if you’d like to keep on top of what’s going on in the development of KDE software, I highly recommend following Nate Graham’s blog: https://pointieststick.com/
Cheers!
I’ve returned to using KDE some time ago (working on home PC is one of the dubious benefits of confinement) and I think it has come of age, striking a good balance between customizability and usability for the intended audiences (technical users really).
Nevertheless the biggest gripe I’ve always had with KDE has never truly gone away despite switching to the most curated distribution (Neon) is the stability. Not one day can pass with something (a daemon, app) triggering the infamous dialog. All that w/o any fancy customizations and running the distro mostly on its defaults. I never seen other linux desktop software with such a lousy reliability. Fortunately it’s mostly an annoyance (I’m yet to loose work because of that) but there must be some cultural thing associated with the KDE ecosystem that makes it stand out to such an extent on the QA front.
KDE Neon is meant to show off the latest KDE, not to be a “curated” distribution. Something like Kubuntu or Manjaro KDE would probably be better if you want a “curated” distribution.
That said, I don’t have these stability problems people complain about with KDE. I don’t know how they happen.
Well I hopped to Neon up from Kubuntu in hope it would improve the situation. In fact it did, but not enough to shake the impression of flakiness.
After using OpenSuse, I can’t stand Kubuntu. OpenSuse is just put together so much better.
As others pointed out, Neon is designed as a showcase and not as a stable daily driver.
I’m (and my users) use KDE / Fedora on a large number of machines and its rock solid,
I’ve heard similar reports from SUSE users and, to some extent, Kubuntu users.
– Gilboa