KDE Plasma 5.21 Bringing Systemd Startup Support, Wayland Improvements

KDE developer Nate Graham known for his weekly development summaries characterized this week as "the floodgates started opening! Amazing stuff has been landing left and right every day this week!"

In addition to this week bringing the Plasma 5.20 Beta, a lot of new code began lining up for Plasma 5.21 as well as fixes for next month's 5.20 release. Among the KDE work that landed this past week includes:

- Plasma now uses systemd for startup when it's present. This should lead to faster startup/load times and other improvements as a result. But it's not landing until Plasma 5.21.

- Better Wayland graphics performance for Plasma 5.20. It's also now possible to drag windows on Wayland from their empty areas, similar to the KDE behavior on X11. This also made it for Plasma 5.20. There is also a Plasma 5.20 Wayland fix to avoid crashing if hovering the cursor over an auto-hide panel.

- A fix in Plasma 5.20 so running a VNC server inside a Plasma session will no longer crash it.

- Okular scrolling improvements.

- Full touch support for the Dolphin file manager.

- The KDE System Settings Shortcuts page will now show what shortcuts have been changed from their defaults.

- Restoring support in Kate for middle-clicking on a tab to close it.

- The KDE Battery Applet now shows the brightness percentage.

- KDE Partition Manager now correctly modifies the fstab file.

- Various Elisa music player improvements.

More details on the big ticket KDE changes this week via Nate's blog.