With the fourth maintenance update for the current Linux desktop KDE Plasma 5.25, which is supposed to contribute to a better user experience (UX) with new looks for its UI, the developers fix potentially possible crashes Wine applications and Proton games in sessions using the free Wayland display server protocol.
Reduced crashes under Wine and Proton
Just three weeks after the release of KDE Plasma 5.25.3, KDE Plasma 5.25.4 aims to further improve free desktop Wayland sessions by fixing an issue that could cause Wine applications and Proton games to crash on Steam . This problem mostly occurred when users switched between the virtual desktops with a touchpad swipe gesture. In addition, isolated crashes of KWin, the KDE Plasma window manager and Wayland compositor, have been fixed, the mouse pointer animations corrected and the window shade function (“Window Shade”) improved.
According to the official release notes, the following modules of the desktop environment have received an update:
- KWin
- Breeze Discover
- Info Center
- Plasma Addons
- Plasma Workspace
- Plasma Desktop
- Power Devil
- Firewall
- Oxygen
KDE Plasma becomes even more customizable
Based on the latest KDE Framework 5.95 and the cross-platform free GUI toolkit Qt in version 5.15.3, the developers of the KDE community supported by KDE e.V. have released the latest version of their free desktop. KDE Plasma 5.25 continues to follow the path already taken by KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS, but sets completely new visual accents.
KDE Plasma 5.25 with new themesIn addition to the so-called “Floating Panel”, a new optional view for the counterpart to the Windows taskbar, which resembles a dock like macOS has, and additional adaptive accent colors as well as even more customizable plasma themes, the main focus of the free KDE developer community is currently on a consistent user interface and an even better user experience.
Test KDE Plasma 5.25 with KDE neon
The easiest way to try out KDE Plasma 5.25 is with KDE neon, an in-house Ubuntu derivative of the own community, which is intended in particular to showcase the advantages of KDE Plasma with the latest packages.
- KDE Plasma 5.25.4
- KDE Frameworks 5.96
- KDE Gear 22.04.3
The latest KDE neon build 20220728 from July 28th can be downloaded directly below as usual of this message from the download area of ComputerBase.
Provides further information the official website and the developer blog.