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.

KDE developers remain as busy as ever even with pandemic and Christmas season upon us.

Ahead of the holidays the KDE development work is as busy as ever from Plasma 5.21 to its large desktop application set.

KDE Plasma Mobile continues working its way into increasing polished form and with deployments on the likes of the PinePhone have shown it can be quite a capable open-source mobile Linux contender.

It's been another busy week of bug fixing in the KDE space along with other feature work, including on the Plasma Wayland front.

The first week of November brought numerous improvements to the KDE stack.

For those still fond of the once venerable KDE 3.5 desktop, the Trinity Desktop Environment is still maintaining its KDE 3.5 fork after more than one decade. Trinity Desktop R14.0.9 debuted today with some additional applications now included and other updates.

The bug fixing in KDE land continues and ends the month with a "bug massacre", for how KDE developer Nate Graham describes it in his weekly recaps.

KDE developers remain very busy this autumn working on fixes for the recently released Plasma 5.20 and related software.

This week marked the release of Plasma 5.20 while KDE developers continue working towards not only Plasma 5.21 as the next desktop feature release but also providing fixes for next month's Plasma 5.20.1 release and the growing collection of KDE applications.

Following this week's KDE Plasma 5.20 release, KWinFT 5.20 has been released as the fork of KWin and other select components in aiming to offer a better experience.

KDE's Plasma 5.20 is now available as a seriously great update to this open-source desktop environment.

Krita 4.4 is out today as the latest release for this flagship open-source digital painting program.

KDE developers have been busy not only putting the finishing touches on the soon to be released Plasma 5.20 but also early feature work continues on what will be Plasma 5.21.

Not only is the Plasma 5.20 desktop shining and more Wayland improvements and other enhancements queuing for Plasma 5.21, but the Plasma Mobile effort is also beginning to shine.

Launched at the start of the year was the Kubuntu Focus as a polished KDE laptop while now it's been succeeded by a second-generation model.

KDE developers for more than one year have been working to evolve the default Breeze theme and the work by the KDE Visual Design Group is finally paying off with the initial "Breeze Evolution" changes landing.

While Plasma 5.20 isn't shipping until later this month, already for Plasma 5.21 down the pipe is a big change and that is the optional support for systemd starting up of the Plasma session. This can lead to faster startup/load times and other improvements while even the process of bringing up the systemd support helped uncover other KDE bugs.