KDE Plasma 5.12 Reaches Beta With Faster Start-Up Time, Better Wayland Support

Written by Michael Larabel in KDE on 15 January 2018 at 03:59 PM EST. 42 Comments
KDE
Ahead of the official release expected in February, the KDE Plasma 5.12 Beta is available today as the latest step forward for the KDE desktop.

KDE Plasma 5.12 is going to be a Long Term Support (LTS) release and as such there's a lot of new features as well as bug fixing and stabilization work that took place this cycle.

KDE Plasma 5.12 Beta features improved start-up time, a lot of Wayland improvements with this being the first Plasma 5 LTS having Wayland support, lower CPU and memory usage, improvements to KDE Discover (including production-ready Flatpak support), and various refinements throughout the massive Plasma code-base.

Some of the Wayland work for KDE Plasma 5.12 includes only making use of XWayland when needed, KScreen resolution handling, screen rotation support, support for fullscreen Wayland windows, and support for various new Wayland protocols from XDG Shell v6 to AppMenu to the idle inhibit interface.

More details on KDE Plasma 5.12 Beta via KDE.org. KDE Plasma 5.12.0 is expected for release on 6 February.
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