The third maintenance release of the KDE Plasma 5 open source desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems was supposed to be released on Tuesday, January 5, 2016, according to the official release schedule.

Today, January 6, 2016, we've spotted the official announcement for the KDE Plasma 5.5.3 bugfix release for January 2016, so we've thought that it will be a very good idea to share with our readers what's new in this third point release of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.

"Today KDE releases a bugfix update to Plasma 5, versioned 5.5.3. Plasma 5.5 was released in December 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 today's announcement.

Bringing only bug fixes and new translations to the KDE Plasma 5.5 branch, the highlights of KDE Plasma 5.5.3 include a fix for an issue with the icon hover effect, which was broken after using the Dashboard, and the replacements of kdelibs4's kde-runtime sound effect with the Oxygen one.

KDE Plasma 5.6 coming in Spring 2016

Moreover, the notifications have been improved in the way that the screen that handled the code was refactored to repair the 'Notification Settings wrong default display for notifications and notification position' error. For more details about what exactly was changed in KDE Plasma 5.5.3 since KDE Plasma 5.5.2, please refer to the full changelog.

The KDE Plasma 5.5 series will get two more maintenance releases in the coming weeks, KDE Plasma 5.5.4 on January 26 and KDE Plasma 5.5.5 on March 1, 2016. Then, the KDE developers will start work on the next major version of the desktop environment, KDE Plasma 5.6, but until then, you can get the KDE Plasma 5 Live ISO images.