KDE Begins Shifting Focus To Fixing Bugs For Plasma 5.25

KDE Plasma 5.25 has embarked on its soft feature freeze meaning the focus is quickly turning from feature development to bug fixing and testing for this next KDE desktop update.

While not too many features introduced for KDE this week, there was support for optionally giving panels a "floating" appearance. KDE Discover now allows showing an apps' level of access to system resources like network, device, etc. Discover also now allows easily deleting settings and user data when uninstalling sandboxed apps. On the app side, Kate 22.08 will now show a toolbar by default, more KWin effects can be activated using screen edge swipes, improved screen unlocking with fingerprint authentication, and other refinements.

Bug fixes over the past week include restoring AMD GPU information within KDE System Monitor, System Settings' Display Configuration will now show the correct refresh rate in more configurations. There is also a possible kded daemon crash fix within the Plasma Wayland session, rewritten Present Windows and Desktop Grid effects, Plasma no longer crashing when it cannot find the active theme, memory leaks for Kirigami-based apps, and other fixes.

KDE developer Nate Graham wrote more at length about these changes and other features and fixes to land this week. Head on over to Nate's blog for his usual Saturday recap of all the notable KDE changes for the week.

Plasma 5.25 is working up to a release on 14 June while the Plasma 5.25 Beta is expected on 19 May.