KDE Plasma 5.22 Beta Ready For Testing With Much Better Wayland Experience

KDE developers this week have issued the much anticipated Plasma 5.22 beta for testing, which is exciting this time around largely for bringing its Wayland support up to par for daily use with quite a lot of polishing and optimizations.

Plasma 5.22 has quite well-rounded Wayland support now and should deliver a good experience especially for Linux gamers with finally adding direct scan-out support, FreeSync / Adaptive-Sync plumbing, and much more. Some of the Plasma 5.22 highlights include:

- Many Wayland improvements like support for activities, better Global Menu applet support, and "hugely improved Wayland support in general." Support for Variable Rate Refresh / FreeSync (Adaptive-Sync) on Wayland and vertical and horizontal maximization now works on Wayland with KWin.

- KWin now supports direct scan-out for full-screen windows (such as full-screen games) for non-NVIDIA GPUs on Wayland, which is a big help to performance in avoiding extra copies.

- KWin can now also support GPU hot-plugging on Wayland such as for USB connected display adapters or Thunderbolt external GPUs.

- New adaptive panel transparency feature for the panel and widgets.

- Improved notifications.

- Plasma System Monitor has replaced KSysGuard as the default system monitoring application.

Ahead of next month's official Plasma 5.22 release, those interested can test the beta version via KDE.org.