KDE News Archives

KDE developers began November working on yet more Plasma Wayland session fixes and other enhancements to their open-source desktop environment.

The Trinity Desktop Environment as a decade-old project that forked from the KDE 3.5 desktop continues persevering bit-by-bit to improve this once widely enjoyed desktop environment.

KDE Plasma 5.23 offers much better Plasma Wayland support than prior releases but still the journey of polished Wayland support on-par with X11 is not over. KDE developers ended out October working on more Wayland fixes along with other improvements to this open-source desktop.

It's been an exciting week for KDE developers with preparing their formal support for handling NVIDIA's driver with GBM support as well as getting fingerprint authentication finally in place, among other improvements.

This week marked the release of Plasma 5.23 in celebrating 25 years of the KDE desktop project while celebrations didn't last long with developers already hard at work on the Plasma 5.23.1 point release, feature work for Plasma 5.24, and also improvements to the KDE Applications and KDE Frameworks.

KDE Plasma 5.23 is officially out this morning as the newest major open-source desktop release and is known now as the KDE 25th Anniversary Edition.

Krita 5.0 Beta 2 is out today as the newest test release for this very powerful, open-source digital painting program.

KDE developers remain very busy squashing bugs ahead of the release of Plasma 5.23 that is also known as the Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition.

Plasma 5.23 stable is due to be released in two weeks while until then KDE developers are scurrying to land more fixes in this next desktop update.

With the KDE Plasma 5.23 release quickly approaching, feature development is already heating up for Plasma 5.24 while concurrently driving many fixes into the v5.23 codebase.

Along with releasing Plasma 5.23 Beta this week, KDE developers have been busy on driving in a bunch of Plasma Wayland fixes and other refinements to their stack.

It was in October of 1996 that the KDE desktop environment was founded and as such with marking twenty-five years since its creation, the forthcoming Plasma 5.23 is being advertised as the "25th Anniversary Edition" for the desktop.

It's been a busy start to September for the KDE project and is now under its soft feature freeze for Plasma 5.23.

KDE developers have kicked off September by landing many fixes for their desktop stack, including around their Plasma Wayland session.

The Plasma 5.23 desktop release is looking like it will be quite an eventful milestone while KDE developers are finishing August strong with many improvements and fixes across their desktop stack.

It's been another busy week in KDE land with the seemingly never ending improvements to the Plasma Wayland session as well as introducing some new features like a new Overview Effect.

Krita 5.0 is on the way as the next major feature release to this popular, open-source digital painting program.

Kdenlive 21.08 is now available as the newest feature upgrade to KDE's non-linear video editor.

KDE developers had another busy summertime week with a variety of UI improvements and other polishing to this open-source desktop environment.

It's been two years already since Latte Dock 0.9 was released while finally Latte Dock 0.10 is ready to officially meet the world this weekend.

The first week of August saw many fixes land in the KDE camp as they prepare for their software to be used on more third-party products, with Steam Deck being just the latest notable product leveraging KDE.

While KDE on Wayland has generally enjoyed good HiDPI support, it's now taken until 2021 for KDE's X11 HiDPI support to be in a position of greater usability after evolving over the years.

KDE developers show no signs of slowing down during the pandemic or being distracted over the summer months as it was another busy week advancing this open-source desktop environment.

The folks working on KDE's mobile efforts have released Plasma Mobile 21.07 as the newest feature release.

In between celebrating the fact that Valve's newly announced Steam Deck runs KDE Plasma when exiting the Steam confines, KDE developers had a very busy week with a number of different improvements to their open-source desktop.

The KWinFT fork of KDE's KWin compositor has landed its support for using the WLROOTS Wayland library.

Fixes to the Plasma Wayland session continue to be quite steady work in the KDE camp even with the support becoming quite mature and good enough for day-to-day use.

KDE developers ended June with yet more Plasma Wayland fixes plus a number of other worthwhile fixes too.

Even with Akademy 2021 this week as the annual KDE developer conference, thanks in part to it being a virtual event the KDE developers still managed to remain quite productive on new code changes.

The virtual KDE Akademy 2021 conference kicked off on Friday and runs through the 25th. This annual summertime event of the KDE desktop community is attended by hundreds but again carried out online due to the pandemic.

Even with the warm summer weather and many municipalities loosening pandemic lockdown restrictions, KDE developers remain quite busy this summer with a variety of improvements to this open-source desktop.

Announced last year was KWinFT as a fork of KDE's KWin to focus on improving the Wayland support more rapidly and incorporating other modern technologies. KWinFT has been making progress on advancing its code-base while in recent months it was seemingly more quiet. However, it turns out KWinFT is alive and well and has been going through some code refactoring while preparing for the next wave of feature work.

KDE developers didn't spend much time basking over their Plasma 5.22 release this week as they have already begun lining up changes for the first point release, new feature work for Plasma 5.23, and other improvements to this open-source desktop environment.

KDE's big Plasma 5.22 desktop release is now available with maturing its Wayland support continuing to be one of the big ongoing focuses for the project.

Next week will mark the release of the Plasma 5.22 desktop with its Wayland support now much more mature alongside various performance improvements and a variety of other enhancements. Plasma 5.22 is a big step forward while already some feature work is going into Plasma 5.23 and the next round of KDE application updates.

KDE developers are wrapping up May with more performance optimizations and bug fixes in tow.

Following the introduction of KHamburgerMenu, the latest KDE user-interface element being introduced is KCommandBar for expert-focused, HUD-style pop-ups.

With word this week that KDE's Dolphin file manager has adopted a hamburger menu that has re-ignited the discussion once more over client versus server-side decorations for the KDE desktop.

While the Plasma 5.22 beta was released this week, it's not game over yet for still getting more fixes into this next KDE desktop release, especially as it concerns their maturing Wayland support.

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.

KDE developers remain very active polishing up the KDE desktop and addressing various bugs ahead of next month's Plasma 5.22 feature release.

For those still having fond memories of the KDE 3.5 desktop, the Trinity Desktop Environment continues to be maintained in 2021 as a long-running fork from KDE 3.5 with security/maintenance fixes and other minor enhancements to the desktop environment.

KDE developers certainly closed out April on a high note with some big ticket additions.

KDE developers continue polishing up their Wayland support and making other improvements to their desktop stack.

It's been another busy spring week in KDE land.

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.