Tuesday, 11 August 2015. Today KDE releases a beta release of the new
version of Plasma 5.4.

This release of Plasma brings many nice touches for our users such as
much improved high DPI support, KRunner auto-completion and many new
beautiful Breeze icons. It also lays the ground for the future with a
tech preview of Wayland session available. We're shipping a few new
components such as an Audio Volume Plasma Widget, monitor calibration
tool and the User Manager tool comes out beta.

New Audio Volume Applet

Our new Audio Volume applet works directly with Pulseaudio, the
popular sound server for Linux, to give you full control over volume
and output settings in a beautifully designed simple interface.

Application Dashboard alternative launcher

Plasma 5.4 brings an entirely new fullscreen launcher Application
Dashboard in kdeplasma-addons: Featuring all features of Application
Menu it includes sophisticated scaling to screen size and full spatial
keyboard navigation. The new launcher allows you to easily and quickly
find applications, as well as recently used or favorited documents and
contacts based on your previous activity.

Artwork Galore

Plasma 5.4 brings over 1400 new icons covering not only all the KDE
applications, but also providing Breeze themed artwork to apps such as
Inkscape, Firefox and Libreoffice providing a more integrated, native
feel.
KRunner

KRunner history

KRunner now remembers your previous searches and automatically
completes from the history as you type.


Network Graphs

Useful graphs in Networks applet

The Networks applet is now able to display network traffic graphs. It
also supports two new VPN plugins for connecting over SSH or SSTP.

Other changes and additions

Much improved high DPI support
Smaller memory footprint
Our desktop search got new and much faster backend
Sticky notes adds drag & drop support and keyboard navigation
Trash applet now works again with drag & drop
System tray gains quicker configurability
Wayland tech preview (complete Plasma wayland session), driven by Plasma Mobile
The documentation has been reviewed and updated
Improved layout for Digital clock in slim panels
ISO date support in Digital clock
New easy way to switch 12h/24h clock format in Digital clock
Week numbers in the calendar
Any type of item can now be favorited in Application Menu (Kicker)
from any view, adding support for document and Telepathy contact
favorites
Telepathy contact favorites show the contact photo and a realtime
presence status badge
Improved focus and activation handling between applets and containment
on the desktop
Various small fixes in Folder View: Better default sizes, fixes for
mouse interaction issues, text label wrapping
The Task Manager now tries harder to preserve the icon it derived for
a launcher by default
It's possible to add launchers by dropping apps on the Task Manager again
It's now possible to configure what happens when middle-clicking a
task button in the Task Manager: Nothing, window close, or launching a
new instance of the same app
The Task Manager will now sort column-major if the user forces more
than one row; many users expected and prefer this sorting as it causes
less task button moves as windows come and go
Improved icon and margin scaling for task buttons in the Task Manager
Various small fixes in the Task Manager: Forcing columns in vertical
instance now works, touch event handling now works on all systems,
fixed a visual issue with the group expander arrow
Provided the Purpose framework tech preview is available, the
QuickShare Plasmoid can be used, making it easy to share files on many
web services.
Monitor configuration tool added
kwallet-pam is added to open your wallet on login
User Manager now syncs contacts to KConfig settings and the User
Account module has gone away
Performance improvements to Application Menu (Kicker)
Various small fixes to Application Menu (Kicker): Hiding/unhiding apps
is more reliable, alignment fixes for top panels, 'Add to Desktop'
against a Folder View containment is more reliable, better behavior in
the KActivities-based Recent models
Support for custom menu layouts (through kmenuedit) and menu separator
items in Application Menu (Kicker)
Folder View has improved mode when in panel (blog)
Dropping a folder on the Desktop containment will now offer creating a
Folder View again