14 DAY TRIAL // A few moments ago, KDE, through Jonathan Riddell, had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the third and last maintenance release of the KDE Plasma 5.4 desktop environment.
KDE Plasma 5.4.3 is yet another bugfix release, for the month of November 2015, but also the last for the KDE Plasma 5.4 branch of the acclaimed desktop environment, as the developers will concentrate all of their efforts on implementing new features for the next major release, KDE Plasma 5.5.
However, KDE Plasma 5.4.3 is very important for all users of KDE Plasma 5.4, as it addresses many of those annoying issues that have been reported since the previous maintenance release of the desktop environment, KDE Plasma 5.4.2. Among the most important changes, we can mention fixes for multiple crashes in KWin.
Also new in KDE Plasma 5.4.3 is an updated KSplash background to reflect the changes brought by the KDE Plasma 5.4 wallpaper. Then, there's also a patch for a crash that occurred when attempting to exit the KScreen KDE Control Module (KCM) in System Settings, as well as some PackageKit-related fixes for the Muon package manager.
"Today KDE releases a bugfix update to Plasma 5, versioned 5.4.3. Plasma 5.4 was released in August with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience. This release adds a month's worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors," reads the announcement.
KDE Plasma 5.5 coming soon
As reported by Softpedia the other day, the KDE developers are now working around the clock to add new features to the KDE Plasma 5.5 desktop environment, which should be unveiled on the first week of December 2015. But until then, we will be able to take the Beta release for a test drive next week, on November 19, 2015.
All GNU/Linux users who are running a modern distribution built around the KDE Plasma 5.4 desktop environment should check for the KDE Plasma 5.4.3 update in the coming days, which should be available in the default software repositories of the operating system.
Update: KDE Plasma 5.4.3 is already available in Kubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) as well as various other bleeding-edge GNU/Linux distributions, such as Arch Linux, OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, and Debian Stretch.