More KDE KWin Wayland improvements are coming down the pipe.

It's been another week of fixes and feature work for the KDE desktop as the march continues toward the Plasma 5.22 release this summer.

The KDE project and the open-source Linux community has been in a sticky situation with The Qt Company having moved Qt 5.15 LTS to its commercial-only phase while most free software hasn't even been ported yet to Qt 6 let alone a number of modules and other features still missing from the Qt 6 tool-kit. So until the KDE project has fully transitioned to using the Qt 6 tool-kit, the project has taken up maintaining their own collection of Qt 5.15 patches.

The pandemic is still not showing any signs of slowing down KDE development but with the new month brings more changes and improvements to this open-source desktop.

KDE developers are finishing the month of March strong with a number of new features and bug fixes for their open-source desktop stack.

As we get ready for spring, KDE developers continue polishing up their Wayland support for the Plasma 5.22 cycle.

One year into the pandemic the KDE developers remain as busy as ever advancing their free software desktop solution.

KDE developers have been off to a busy March so far with working on adaptive panel opacity support for Plasma 5.22. Another pleasant improvement with that next Plasma release is to avoid rendering work when the screen is off.

Exiv2, the widely-used C++ metadata library / tools for dealing with image metadata via EXIF / IPTC / XMP standards and ICC profiles is looking to join the KDE project.

KDE developers have been wrapping up February with a number of new command line tools being worked on for applying various cosmetic changes to the desktop. There have also been many crash fixes addressed in recent days.

Following the recent major rewrite to KDE's KWin compositor code there are more exciting improvements likely to come for KWin in improving its Wayland compositor support.

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.

The KDE community today released Plasma 5.21 as the latest major release of this open-source desktop.

Plasma 5.21 is due for release on 16 February and as such developers have been busy working on bug fixing for the final stretch of development.

KDE developer Roman Gilg continues pushing ahead with KWinFT as a fork of the KWin window manager / compositor and other select components. He spent a lot of time last year better optimizing the X11 and Wayland handling while he's been relentlessly working this year to push it even further.

While Plasma 5.21 isn't even out for a few more days, there is now a big reason to look forward to KDE's Plasma 5.22 release later in the year: KWin finally supports direct scan-out for full-screen games/apps!

KDE Plasma 5.21 Beta released last week while the official Plasma 5.21 stable release is slated for 16 February. As such, KDE developers have been very busy working on fixes for this big desktop update bringing better Wayland support and other enhancements and new features.

In addition to shipping the Plasma 5.21 beta this week, KDE developers were very active in not only working out fixes for next month's Plasma 5.21 desktop but also other improvements to KDE applications.

KDE Plasma 5.21 is now in beta as what will be the first major KDE desktop update of the new year.

KDE developers have remained very busy in the new year working to improve their open-source desktop stack.

KDE's KWin window manager / compositor has seen a "near total rewrite" of its compositing code that should sharply improve the desktop.

While development on KDE (and other open-source projects too) was lighter this week as a result of the Christmas and New Year's holidays, the KDE desktop still saw some refinements this week.

KDE developer Nate Graham who has made a lot of contributions to KDE in recent years and is well known for his weekly KDE development summaries has published a 2021 roadmap for the year.

KDE had a very eventful year even with the pandemic where it saw its Wayland support come together quite well that it's usable on a day-to-day basis, KWin has been seeing some renewed attention, and there was much application work as well as fixes and polishing throughout the massive KDE ecosystem.

Even with Christmas week there has been a lot of improvements still happening in the KDE world.

Winter holidays haven't yet slowed down the pace of improvements for the KDE desktop stack. It was another busy week enhancing KDE Plasma and related desktop components with new functionality and fixes.

Project Halium for the past several years has allowed various Linux distributions to build atop the likes of libhybris and other abstractions for running on hardware with Android pre-installed. This abstraction layer has been popular from KDE Plasma Mobile to UBports to Sailfish OS while now Plasma Mobile is discontinuing their support.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development summary highlighting the desktop project's changes for the week. WebRTC support with the screencast code in Plasma now works on Wayland, but the Plasma Wayland changes are lighter than we've seen in recent weeks. Instead the emphasis this week seems to have been on enhancing KDE's usability.

KDE Plasma users will hopefully be seeing the KWin Wayland compositor perform better and more reliably in 2021.

KDE developers have been busy so far in December making improvements from seemingly never-ending Wayland improvements to new features like easier support for accented character input without having to remember key sequences or changing your keyboard layout.