A long time ago, when Metallica released their Death Magnetic, I saw for the first time something that many artists now do: they presented three songs before the album was released as a promotion. That helped me to learn that it is a practice that I don't like, because I end up "burning" those three songs and then, when I listen to the entire album, those songs sound strange to me. That's what I thought on Monday with some videos they posted about KDE Gear 21.08.
Today's news is that the project of the K launched a new series from your app set, and that means new functions arrive. If I have commented on the music, it is because on Monday they published a video about Dolphin (this), on Tuesday one about Konsole (this) and yesterday Wednesday one about Elisa (this). Each ad has a style, but the important thing is the summary list that you have below. There are also news in the weekly articles on what's new the project is working on.
KDE Gear 21.08 Highlights
- Dolphin:
- If a folder contains many preview files, an animated preview sequence will be displayed so that we can check if the folder contains what we are looking for.
- Dolphin preview code has also been optimized in this version and thumbnails now appear faster.
- The information in the side panel (F11) is now updated in real time.
- Improvements in usability.
- Improved KHamburger.
- Okular it is now more accessible in document, book, and comic manipulation, among other changes that will make using the KDE document viewer easier to use.
- Console:
- Previews extend to images and folders: Hovering over the name of an image file in a list in Konsole will bring up a thumbnail showing a preview. Hovering over a folder will preview its contents. This is very useful when we want to make sure that we are copying, moving or deleting the correct thing.
- Clicking on a file and it will open in its corresponding application: an image will open in a viewer like Gwenview, a PDF will open in a document viewer like Okular, or an MP3 file will open in a music player like Elisa, for example.
- Gwenview:
- Performance improvements.
- Compact controls at the bottom right for zooming, among other things.
- KHamburger.
- Elisa now you can enter party mode with the (Fn) F11 key. During the weekends, it is one of the apps that they talk about the most and they improve it a lot every four months.
- Show:
- Now you can take screenshots of the window where the cursor is with META + Ctrl + ImpPt.
- Greater reliability and speed at Wayland.
- Kate- Snippets are now easier to get as they can be found in their own category in Discover (KDE's software management tool). Additionally, Kate's Language Server Protocol (LSP) now supports the Dart programming language.
- Kdenlive has migrated to MTL 7.
- KDE Connect has reached the Microsoft Store.
- Yakuake now allows you to switch from one panel to the next with the Ctrl + Tab keys. For those who do not know it, it is a terminal that comes down from the top like the one in the video game Quake (hence its name)
- Ark:
- Now it shows a welcome screen if we open it directly, without doing it through any file.
- Support for decompressing files with Windows-like bars as separators.
KDE Gear 21.08 has been released a few minutes ago, so developers can now start working with their code. They are already available in KDE neon, and it is expected that a little later, maybe in a month (or two) they will arrive at the Backports PPA. On when they will reach other distributions will depend on their development model or their philosophy.