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    <a href="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/plasma-5.17.png" data-toggle="lightbox">
        <img src="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/plasma-5.17-wee.png" height="342" width="600" style="width: 100%; max-width: 600px; height: auto;" alt="Plasma 5.17 Beta" />
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    <figcaption>KDE Plasma 5.17 Beta</figcaption>
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<p>Thursday, 19 September 2019.</p>
<p>Today KDE launches the beta release of Plasma 5.17.</p>

<p>We've added a bunch of new features and improvements to KDE's lightweight yet full featured desktop environment.</p>

<p><a href='https://kde.org/plasma-desktop'>Plasma's updated web page</a> gives more background on why you should use it on your computer.</p>

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<a href="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/guillermo.png" data-toggle="lightbox">
<img src="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/guillermo-wee.png" style="padding: 10px" width="350" height="334" alt="Guillermo Amaral" />
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<figcaption style="text-align: right">Guillermo Amaral</figcaption>
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<p>System Settings has gained new features to help you manage your fancy Thunderbolt hardware, plus Night Color is now on X11 and a bunch of pages got redesigned to help you get your configuration done easier.  Our notifications continue to improve with a new icon and automatic do-not-disturb mode for presentations.  Our Breeze GTK theme now provides a better appearance for the Chromium/Chrome web browsers and applies your color scheme to GTK and GNOME apps. The window manager KWin has received many HiDPI and multi-screen improvements, and now supports fractional scaling on Wayland.</p>
<p>You can test the Plasma 5.17 beta for the next three weeks until the final release in mid-October.  Give it a whirl with your favorite distribution!</p>

<p>The Plasma 5.17 series is dedicated to our friend Guillermo Amaral. Guillermo was an enthusiastic KDE developer who rightly self described as 'an incredibly handsome multidisciplinary self-taught engineer'.  He brought cheer to anyone he met.  He lost his battle with cancer last summer but will be remembered as a friend to all he met.</p>

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<h3 id="desktop">Plasma</h3>
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<img src="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/unsplash-pic-of-day-wee.png" style="border: 0px" width="350" height="280" alt="<a href='https://unsplash.com/'>Unsplash</a> Picture of the Day" />
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<figcaption style="text-align: right"><a href='https://unsplash.com/'>Unsplash</a> Pic of the Day</figcaption>
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<a href="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/inches-to-cm.png" data-toggle="lightbox">
<img src="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/inches-to-cm-wee.png" style="border: 0px" width="350" height="159" alt="<a href='https://unsplash.com/'>Unsplash</a> Pic of the Day" />
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<figcaption style="text-align: right">KRunner now converts fractional units</figcaption>
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<a href="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/notification-widget.png" data-toggle="lightbox">
<img src="http://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.17/notification-widget-wee.png" style="border: 0px" width="250" height="230" alt="Improved Notifications widget and widget editing UX" />
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<figcaption style="text-align: right">Improved Notifications widget and widget editing UX</figcaption>
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