KDE Plasma 5.22 Released With Much Better Wayland Support, Usability Enhancements

KDE's big Plasma 5.22 desktop release is now available with maturing its Wayland support continuing to be one of the big ongoing focuses for the project.

KDE Plasma 5.22 brings much better Wayland support -- "hugely improved" is how the 5.22 beta release phrased it. There is now support for variable rate refresh (VRR) / Adaptive-Sync on Wayland, vertical/horizontal maximization now working with KWin Wayland, global menu applet support under Wayland, support for activities, and a lot of other general improvements and fixes so the overall Wayland support is much more polished and nearly at par to the X.Org Server support.

The performance for gaming with KDE Plasma on Wayland should also be better with now having direct scan-out support for full-screen windows. Rounding out the graphics fun with this release is also GPU hot-plugging support on Wayland for KWin, such as if using an external GPU or USB display adapter.

KDE Plasma 5.22 also delivers on adaptive panel transparency for the panel and wigets, desktop notification improvements, Plasma System Monitor has replaced KSysGuard as the default system monitoring application, and a variety of other improvements.

Learn more about the shiny Plasma 5.22 update on the KDE.org release page.