KDE Sees More Crash Fixes Following Plasma 5.21 Release

Earlier this week saw the release of Plasma 5.21 while KDE developers have been busy working on fixes/improvements to that for the first point release as well as moving forward in other areas like integrating Git support into Kate.

There are a number of prominent crash/bug fixes now pending for KDE Plasma 5.21.1 following the initial rush of users to the new release. Some of the prominent changes to KDE this week include:

- The Kate text editor with Kate 21.04 will allow performing Git operations like viewing diffs, staging, committing, and more from within the program itself.

- The Plasma Wayland session with KDE Plasma 5.21.1 will no longer crash on NVIDIA Optimus laptops.

- Logging out of the Plasma desktop will no longer "sometimes just fail". For some users it happened as much as 30~50% of the time. This turns out to be from DBus and there is a interim workaround now in place with libkworkspace until a proper solution can be devised. "Calls to a DBus activated service can fail if the sender quits whilst the service is spawning and using dbus-daemon. This is a lazy interim fix that just makes these calls block as proper fixes will require more work."

- KDE Plasma 5.21's new Plasma System Monitor application will no longer crash at launch if not using the systemd startup functionality.

- KWin restores the option to disable screen tearing protection and maximize the refresh rate. KDE Plasma 5.21 with multi-monitor issues were hitting poor performance/experience.

- With KDE Frameworks 5.80, Plasma will no longer crash when installing a Windows app using Wine.

More details on the KDE changes via the weekly recap by KDE developer Nate Graham.