KDE Plasma 5.13 is out in beta form today ahead of its planned release in June. Plasma 5.13 has ended up being a very compelling and huge upgrade for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop.

There are tons of improvements and new features to find in Plasma 5.13, which has me quite excited even with running GNOME Shell as my preferred desktop environment. There's been a lot of great progress in KDE Plasma 5.13 including:

- KDE System Settings has been redesigned.

- There's an upgraded interface for the KDE lock and log-in screens, making it look much more slick.

- Firefox/Chrome/Chromium browser integration to allow downloads to appear in the Plasma notification popups, the Media Controls Plasmoid will work with media content from the browser, support for sending links to a mobile device via KDE Connect, and other enhancements.

- Continued improvements with KWin for better Wayland support as well as improved desktop effects, support for high priority EGL contexts, and initial support for screencasts and desktop sharing.

- Many improvements to KDE Discover.

- A tech preview for the GTK global menu integration.

- The mouse system settings now supports libinput on X and Wayland.

More details and screenshots of the KDE Plasma 5.13 beta are available from KDE.org.

The official KDE Plasma 5.13.0 release is expected on 12 June.