KDE PLASMA 5.15 - Beta preview - Improving the desktop and settings

Plasma has released its first Beta for version 5.15, which focuses on fixing papercuts and usability issues, as well as improving integration with GTK applications, and Firefox, and largely improving Discover, Plasma's App Store. I think it's time for me to dive back in the KDE / Plasma world !

Plasma 5.15 release notes: https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.14.90.php

The Desktop and Widgets A lot of improvements have been made to the desktop itself, with the ability to download walpaper plugins from the config dialog. The filenames displayed on the desktop now handle tiny icon sizes better.

Krunner has been improved to handle duplicate bookmarks or entries, only showing one entry per item. On the widget side of things, bluetooth devices will now show their battery level in the "power" widget, if you have the latest versions of upower and blueZ.

Widget improvements include the device notifier, which now can prevent you from unmounting the root partition to avoid locking your system, the Notes widget can now be made transparent if that's what you like, padding and appearance of notifications has been improved, and the virtual desktop pager can now wrap around when scrolling over it. Speaking of virtual desktops, the config panel has been totally revamped, it's now much more consistent with other settings panels.

Settings Text labels, icons and button placement have been standardized all over, it's especially noticeable with the "Get New" buttons, which are now placed more consistenly through most settings panels. Other improved panels include the Desktop Effects settings page. In this particular panel, new desktop effects you downloaded from the "Get new" button will now appear on the list immediately.

The login page settings also have received a bunch of improvements, with the preview of the Breeze theme reflecting its current appearance, and the background color of the preview now displays the color scheme you have selected.

Discover It has been largely enhanced and tweaked to be more coherent and more usable. Discover can now show you a notification to upgrade your distribution to its latest version, complete with a restart button if one is needed after the upgrade. Updates can now be checked or unchecked all at a time, to make selecting the ones you want or not easier.

Discover also handles packages better, with support for Flatpak app extensions, and local packages now show their dependencies and present a "launch" button to immediately start them after installation. Application and Plasma add-ons will now have their own category on the update page, to make them easier to locate.

Cross-Platform Integration Plasma has been working on better integrating applications using other toolkits than Qt. For example, Firefox 64 can now use th ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hTiwDeXNRA