KDE Plasma 5.27 Released - Better Wayland Support, KWin Tiling, Multi-Monitor Overhaul

[ngraham]

I always have high hopes for KDE and it mostly delivers. But padding is something that let me down a bit. For example, in that photo shared in the official announcement, I don't know if that's how it's suppose to be, but the left padding for the date and the title "Time Zones" are not the same. The left padding for "January" is way smaller than the others and the bottom padding for the date in the taskbar is practically no existent.

These are already fixed. The release announcement actually took that screenshot from my blog, and at the time I took the screenshot, it hadn't been fixed yet. The lack of padding for the date is a non-default setting that I use on my personal machine to get more space for the text since it's quite limited on vertical panels. By default, the padding is consistent across panel widgets.

[TemplarGR]

I just want a stable KDE. I'm stuck on x11 due to nvidia wayland issues - but commandbar menus are usually invisible to me across apps.

KDE IS stable, and i say that as someone who prefers GNOME.... Last year i wanted a change and decided to mainly use Plasma as my desktop for the whole year... My Plasma wayland sessions have been rock solid for more than a year, ROCK SOLID, that is, better than most things i have ever used in the last 3 decades across all OSes. KDE used to be shit and crashed all the time but they seriously did impressive work in that department and i almost never witness any glitch or crash. I am amazed. I am saying that as a user of Intel and AMD graphics hardware though, i haven't touched Nshitia in more than a decade. If you have Nvidia issues, do not blame the DE, blame Nshitia and stop voting with your wallet to support evil monopolist corporations that are also anti-open source and standards.

[NeoMorpheus]

KDE IS stable, and i say that as someone who prefers GNOME.... Last year i wanted a change and decided to mainly use Plasma as my desktop for the whole year... My Plasma wayland sessions have been rock solid for more than a year, ROCK SOLID, that is, better than most things i have ever used in the last 3 decades across all OSes. KDE used to be shit and crashed all the time but they seriously did impressive work in that department and i almost never witness any glitch or crash. I am amazed. I am saying that as a user of Intel and AMD graphics hardware though, i haven't touched Nshitia in more than a decade. If you have Nvidia issues, do not blame the DE, blame Nshitia and stop voting with your wallet to support evil monopolist corporations that are also anti-open source and standards.

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High five!

[MadCatX]

5.27 just landed in Arch testing repo. There seems to be some nasty flickering of tooltips when I over items in the systray. I'm eager to try out some multi-monitor scenarios where previous version got confused sometimes.

My one large objection towards the last few Plasma releases still stands: Could the art team please stop futzing around with the Breeze theme? It looked fine around 5.24. Ever since then there has been a bunch of random changes seemingly done just for the sake of changing things. The constant adjustment of thickness of things, the ever-changing degree of roundedness of windows and widgets. In one version windows have borders, in the other they are gone, then they return. Breeze 5.27 is by far the most bizarre looking with the top of windows rounded and the bottom sharp. Some items (like the main menu) have slightly rounded edges, some very rounded edges (systray tooltips), other things have sharp edges. At least when you change the appearance, do it consistently...

[Berniyh]

I was never a big fan of the Breeze theme. I liked the previous Oxygen theme much more, even though maybe it was a bit too playful and also had some problems (the task manager style is pretty weird).
Breeze to me in many ways is kind of a half-copy of the Windows 8 theme, which I also don't like at all.
Unfortunately, Oxygen these days doesn't work that well either anymore, especially if you prefer dark themes as they are more relaxing to the eye.
And I think it's rather low prio in KDE these days since they mostly focus on Breeze.
Thankfully you can easily get other themes that are more appealing than Breeze and work better than Oxygen.

So now I'm using a weird mix of Breeze Dark, Oxygen (The button style is soooo much better) and 3rd party themes …

[Estranged1906]

The announcement doesn't mention another nice new feature: System settings now includes a page to configure Flatpak permissions, so you don't need to install Flatseal:

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/flatpak-kcm

That's neat, is that a default part of Plasma 5.27 or does it need to be explicitly installed by the user or included by the distributor?

[MadCatX]

After some 3 hours with 5.27 I'm afraid that this release is pretty busted. So far it has not fixed any of the multi-screen related issues I've been experiencing, panels tooltips flicker and sometimes show up in a wrong place and there appear to be some new issues with the "snapping" windows placement... This clearly does not look like LTS material. Bug reports file, hopefully at least the new bugs will be easy to sort out.

[Berniyh]

That's neat, is that a default part of Plasma 5.27 or does it need to be explicitly installed by the user or included by the distributor?

It is part of Plasma, but likely as a separate package, like plasma-pa (the Pulseaudio/Pipewire control), so depending on your distribution it could be necessary to install it explicitly.

[woddy]

Yesterday it was already released on Tumbleweed, great !
Great release, no issues so far...I like the new tiling feature.
I'm using Plasma wayland and it looks great!
Thanks to all the devs.

[loganj]

lol just updated the system and after reboot started to spin the fun too much for a laptop (arch). after checking task manager i noticed that plasmashell kept writing on disk with 80Mb/s. nice "fix" there. i've disable that index bloater and it still kept writing like crazy. it stoped after i started firefox.