KDE Plasma 5.3 Beta Offers Better Power Management, Steps Toward Wayland

Being released this morning is the first beta of Plasma 5.3, which is officially Plasma 5.2.95.

KDE Plasma 5.3 is bringing better power management by allowing PM settings to be configured based upon certain activities, no longer will laptops suspend when the lid is closed and connected to an external display, support for power management inhibitions to block the lock screen, animated screen brightness changes, support for keyboard button brightness controls on the lock screen, and much more.

Plasma 5.3 Beta also has a new Bluetooth applet, Bluedeveil was ported to BluezQt, support for blocking/unblocking Bluetooth, a new touchpad configuration module was added to the KDE System Settings, ands there's improved Plasma widgets.

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Yet another addition as part of the Plasma 5.3 Beta is the Plasma Media Center being added as a tech preview.

While not yet ready for production use, KDE Plasma 5.3 also makes steps towards supporting Wayland via work that's gone on within the Plasma and KWin code. However, there's still much more work ahead.

More details on today's KDE Plasma 5.3 Beta release can be found at dot.kde.org. Plasma 5.3.0 is expected to be officially released on 28 April.