The KDE development team announced the availability of the beta release for the next version of the desktop interface for UNIX and Linux operating systems, version 5.22 expected to be released on June 8th, and although only three months have passed since version 5.21 released in February, the development team has worked hard during this period to add new features and performance improvements to the new version 5.22 at the same time that it has worked on fixing bugs and improving the Plasma desktop experience in the previous version.
In this version, the brand-new plasma system monitor that was announced as part of KDE 5.21 replaces KSysguard as a default system monitoring app. Plasma System Monitor provides a wide variety of different views, offering an overview page with information on important core resources, such as memory, disk space, network, and CPU usage. It also provides a quick view of the applications consuming the most resources. This lets you easily locate and zap applications or processes that are slowing your computer down.
The Settings app now opens to a new "Quick Settings" page that shows some of the most common or recently changed settings and offers a link to the place where you can change the wallpaper. The accessibility and keyboard navigability is also improved in this release, and a new entry is added to the Software Update page allowing you to enable or disable offline updates.
The Wayland session has gained a lot of interest in this release, the KWin window manager now supports direct scan-out for full-screen windows run on non-NVIDIA GPUs, setting screens' overscan values, hot-plugging GPUs, and variable refresh rate /FreeSync screens on Wayland.
Activities, Global Menu search through menu items, and the vertical and horizontal maximization feature now work on Wayland as well.
A new adaptive panel transparency feature is added to the panel and panel widgets, making them more transparent, and turns off transparency entirely when there are any maximized windows, and You can also make your panel always transparent or always opaque if you want. The Task Manager’s “Highlight Windows” feature now only highlights windows when hovering over that window’s thumbnail in the tooltip.
The new Kickoff application launcher no longer suffers from either an irritating delay before switching categories or accidentally switched categories when moving the cursor, and the text size can be changed now in the sticky note widget.
System Tray applets are now more consistent: The Digital Clock applet’s popup has been re-designed, and it can be forced to display the date on the same line as the time even for tall panels; You can now select the device profile for your audio devices directly from the Audio Volume system Tray applet, and You can also call up your clipboard history at any time by pressing Meta+V shortcut.
Notifications about files (downloaded files, copied or moved files, etc.) now show the app that will open the file if you trigger the “Open” action, and the notification system now automatically activates Do Not Disturb mode by default while you are sharing your screen or screencasting.
On multi-screen setups, new windows now open on the screen where the mouse cursor is located by default, and the "KRunner" launcher can now display multi-line text for search results, and it is no longer returns duplicate results from across different runners (e.g., searching for “Firefox” no longer offers you the option to launch the app as well as run the command-line firefox binary).
