KDE Plasma 5.27.6 Update: Bug Fixes, Enhancements for Plasma Wayland and Flatpak Apps Support

The KDE Project has released KDE Plasma 5.27.6, the latest update in the KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS desktop environment series. This release aims to address various bugs and annoyances while introducing some improvements.

KDE Plasma 5.27.6 focuses on enhancing the Plasma Wayland session and resolves issues with the Powerdevil daemon crashing when the screen is asleep and fixes cursor handling bugs that caused unusual appearances in XWayland apps. Fractional scaling in Plasma Wayland has also been improved to eliminate line glitches, and visual glitches resulting from blurred and transparent Breeze-themes context menus have been resolved.

The Plasma X11 session has also received enhancements in this update. Specifically, it improves the dragging of files to Task Manager tasks. Additionally, KDE Plasma 5.27.6 refines KRunner search results for very short character strings and enhances window tiling, ensuring the selected gap value affects the gap between windows.

Other notable improvements include better keyboard navigation for the sidebar in System Settings, enabling the use of arrow keys instead of the tab key, particularly useful for devices with a d-pad. The Magic Lamp window minimizing effect has been updated to support floating panels, hidden panels, and multi-screen setups.

Moreover, the support for Flatpak apps has been enhanced when using the Plasma Discover graphical package manager. Discover now displays the versions of updated Flatpak apps correctly and fetches the version numbers for updatable Flatpak apps accurately.

Plasma Discover has also been improved to eliminate a strange error message regarding "No metadata URIs for vendor directory" and to ensure the proper functionality of the "Software Sources" button on the Settings page.

Furthermore, KDE Plasma 5.27.6 brings several fixes and enhancements, including error message display in the UI on the Login Screen (SDDM) page, resolution of crashes in KRunner related to certain math expressions and number input, and improved appearance of the "Add New Page" dialog in the Plasma System Monitor for languages with longer translated strings.

This update also addresses a source of high CPU usage caused by window movement. It improves support for GTK apps, corrects the display of their menus when launched with the Global Menu, enhances Task Manager tooltip window thumbnails when using a horizontal bottom panel, and refines the global "Window to Next/Previous Screen" actions for multi-monitor setups.

Lastly, brightness changes on laptops have been improved by utilizing optional ddcutil support in the Powerdevil daemon. Future releases of Plasma are expected to introduce per-screen brightness control.

Users of KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS desktop environment are encouraged to update to version 5.27.6 as soon as it becomes available in the stable software repositories of their preferred GNU/Linux distributions. This update ensures a more stable, reliable, and enjoyable Plasma experience.