Plasma 5.24 was released a few days ago, and so far it’s been the smoothest release in memory. There have been a few regressions, but fewer than other recent releases. I’m sure all of you who have experienced new issues will speak up in the comments, of course. 
But overall it has gone quite well!
15-Minute Bugs Resolved
Current number of bugs: 83, same as last week. Current list of bugs
In the Plasma Wayland session, panels no longer sometimes randomly freeze especially right after login (Vlad Zahorodnii, as soon as your distro updates their KDE Qt patch collection to include this patch)
Closing your laptop lid when an external monitor plugged in no longer causes the computer to inappropriately go to sleep when the setting to disable this has been used (Somebody awesome, Plasma 5.24)
New Features
Konsole now supports Sixel, allowing it to display .sixel images right inside the window (Matan Ziv-Av, Konsole 22.04)
Konsole now has a new plugin that stores saved commands and pieces of text for you (Tao Guo, Konsole 22.04)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
When using Kate’s feature to stash and restore unsaved changes to open files when closing the app, those changes are now actually saved as expected rather than being silently destroyed if you happen to quit the app using the “Quit” action or Ctrl+Q keyboard shortcut instead of clicking on the window’s close button (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.12.3)
Canceling an in-progress archive job now automatically deletes the temporary file that was being created (Méven Car, Ark 22.04)
Konsole’s text re-flow feature now works for lines of text that have no whitespace or newline characters at all (Luis Javier Merino Morán, Konsole 22.04)
System Settings no longer crashes when the active color scheme doesn’t exist on disk for some reason; now it falls back to Breeze Light (the default color scheme) and doesn’t crash (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.24.1)
In the Plasma Wayland session, Plasma no longer always crashes when you screencast in certain circumstances (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24.1)
In the Plasma Wayland session, using custom splash screens once again works (Linus Dierheimer, Plasma 5.24.1)
The Scale effect is once again configurable (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.1)
Links to System Settings pages added to the desktop using the “Add to Desktop” context menu item in Kickoff once again actually appear on the Desktop as expected (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.1)
Certain types of large buttons with text no longer make their text half-invisible when they’re focused with the keyboard (Ingo Klöcker, Plasma 5.24.1)
Info Center’s “Devices” page once again works as expected if the command-line lspci program lives in /sbin/, /usr/sbin, or /usr/local/sbin on your computer (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.24.1)
Dragging desktop files over a Sticky Note applet no longer makes the files temporarily disappear (Severin von Wnuck, Plasma 5.24.1)
In the Plasma X11 session, the cursor no longer disappears while using the “Zoom” effect (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.1)
The Fall Apart effect once again works and no longer interacts strangely with the Overview effect (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.1)
In the Plasma Wayland session, fixed one way that tooltips could be mis-positioned (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.1)
The Overview effect no longer inappropriately shows minimized windows in the desktop thumbnails for moment before immediately hiding them again (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.1)
When using certain 3rd-party window decoration themes, quick-tiling a maximized window no longer unexpectedly de-maximizes the window instead of quick-tiling it (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.1)
System Settings is now faster to launch, especially when using the legacy Icons View mode (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.1)
Dolphin no longer crashes when you close its “Create New File” file dialog in a remote location (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.92)
Fixed a memory leak when canceling in-process move/copy archive (etc) jobs (David Faure, Frameworks 5.92)
Scrollable views with text in QtQuick-based software no longer exhibit visual glitches with text being cut off or squished at the top or bottom when the view is scrolled very slowly a pixel at a time (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.92)
Font changes now take effect instantly in QtQuick-based apps (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.92)
Buttons in System Tray applets that open Info Center pages now work if you don’t happen to have Info Center installed; they instead open the requested page in a separate window (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.92)
All QtQuick-based apps now use slightly fewer CPU resources (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.92)
User Interface Improvements
When an app is installed more than once from different sources (e.g. one version from distro repos, and another version from Flatpak), The context menu for that app in Kickoff no longer has multiple entries saying, “Uninstall or manage add-ons” (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.1)
Searching for apps that are not yet installed no longer returns duplicate entries for matched apps that are available from multiple sources (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.1)
In the Overview effect, apps’ selection highlight effects now disappear when you start to drag them (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.1)
System Settings’ Quick Settings page has received some UI polish for the alignment and spacing of its elements and the clarity of its labels (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):
Kate, KDevelop, and other KTextEditor-based apps now do a much better job of differentiating files opened in tabs that have the same filename (Waqar Ahmed, Frameworks 5.92):
Dragging a file or folder over an item in the Places panel now causes that location to be opened and displayed in the main view so you can drag the thing into a folder inside it. And if the Places panel item you dragged over was an unmounted disk, it is now automatically mounted first! (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.92)
Errors in the open/save dialogs are now shown inline as in Dolphin, rather than with a separate dialog window (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.92)
…And everything else
Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.
How You Can Help
If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!
Otherwise, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!
Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation