KDE Plasma desktop announced the new 5.27 release today! It’s a LTS release with support until 2024!

Plasma 5.27 features new window tiling system. By enabling it in “System Settings > Workspace Behavior > Desktop Effects“, user can press and hold Shift key and then drag app windows to auto-resize and place them in the screen side by side.

By pressing the Windows logo key + T will go into the tile editing mode. There user can configure to have custom tile layouts.

New window tiling systm

The release also introduces a new Welcome dialog, allowing to learn about new features and how to tweak settings, etc.

Other changes in Plasma 5.27 include:

• Improve search function in Discover software manager.
• Search time for other locations in KRunner.
• Search dictionary definition of a word in KRunner.
• Swipe gestures for volume and playback control in Media Player widget
• System Monitor (widget and app) can detect power usage of NVIDIA GPUs.
• New command kde-inhibit --notifications to activate “Do Not Disturb” mode.
• Send windows to Activities via titlebar right-click menu.

KDE Plasma 5.27 PPA for (K)Ubuntu 22.04/(K)Ubuntu 22.10

The new desktop release will be default in KUbuntu 23.04. For current KUbuntu 22.04, KUbuntu Package Archive team has built the new release pages into its experimental PPA for testing purpose.

After testing period, the packages should be made into Kubuntu Backports Extra PPA. Keep an eye on both PPAs and I’ll update here once published!

For KUbuntu 22.10, search for and open konsole from start menu, then run the commands below one by one to install KDE Plamsa 5.27 from KUbuntu Backports PPA.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports

sudo apt full-upgrade