KDE Plasma 5.15 Beta Released With Some Grand Improvements

KDE Plasma 5.15 is scheduled for release on 12 February while for a round of preliminary testing, KDE Plasma 5.15 is out today.

KDE Plasma 5.15 is bringing with it a wealth of usability improvements and polishing with some of the changes including:

- Bluetooth devices now indicating their battery status from the power widget.

- Screen reader support for desktop icons for the visually impaired.

- Much smarter devices notifier.

- Redesigned "virtual desktops" area to the system settings, including support for Wayland.

- Other system settings areas have also been improved upon, one of those areas is a much-improved login screen settings area.

- Firefox 64-bit can optionally use native KDE open/save dialogs.

- Sandboxed Snaps and Flatpak applications can now respect the Plasma configuration when using the new XDG KDE/Plasma integration modules.

- The global scale factor used by HiDPI displays is respected by GTK/GNOME applications. Also on the GNOME front are Breeze-GTK theme improvements.

- Plasma 5.15 on Wayland has received more protocol coverage, support for virtual desktops, touch drag-and-drop support, and other changes.

- Plasma now supports WireGuard VPN tunnels via the NetworkManager plug-in. Network connections can also now be marked as metered connections.

More details on all of the changes to be found in the Plasma 5.15 Beta can be found via today's release announcement on KDE.org. Overall, Plasma 5.15 is shaping up to be a grand release when paired with the latest KDE Frameworks and KDE Applications.