He said it was nearing completion, but Nate Graham continues to publish posts under the name KDE Usability & Productivity. This is week 85 and he did not make it clear if the initiative would come to an end in the 90, the 100 or beyond, but the truth is that for the moment it is still underway to tell us what is to come to the KDE world. And, from what we read this and in past weeks, it seems that Discover will get a lot of love in Plasma 5.17.
Not that the Discover in Plasma 5.17 is going to change much what we know, but it has been mentioned a lot in the last weeks of KDE U&P. Among the highlights we will have that, as of its launch in October, the texts of the Kubuntu software center, KDE neon and many other distributions that use it will be accompanied by icons that will make it clearer which section is in front of us. This week they tell us about a few more small changes.
Discover will be better, like almost everything in Plasma 5.17
New features mentioned this week
- Gwenview 19.12 allows us to configure the compression / quality level, with a default value of 90, the same as Spectacle.
- Spectacle 19.12 can be optionally configured to save the current capture to the clipboard.
- Kate 19.12's advanced search and replace regular expression matching feature includes a regular expression builder helper.
Performance fixes and improvements (2 changes in Discover)
- Cuttlefish, System Preferences, Kdevelop, and Klipper apps no longer show twice in Discover and other software centers (Plasma 5.16.5).
- Using the GNOME Application Style system configuration page no longer removes configuration entries from unmanaged GTK configuration files, which fixes various bugs such as misrepresentation of fonts and inappropriate removal of configured options manually for GTK2 and GTK 3 (Plasma 5.17) applications.
- Discover no longer sometimes displays a string format error message instead of version numbers on its Updates page (Plasma 5.17).
- No longer hangs when trying to overwrite an existing file on an FTP server (Frameworks 5.62).
- It is no longer possible to drag a combobox QML menu out of its frame (Frameworks 5.62).
- In open / save dialog boxes, as well as other online file views, it is no longer possible to uselessly try to create a new file or folder on top of an existing file (Frameworks 5.62).
- Some buttons on certain Plasma widgets (like the Weather widget's Configure button) are no longer comically large (Frameworks 5.62).
- The Konsole 19.08.1 "confirm close multiple tabs" dialog box no longer crashes the application when the "close current tab" option is chosen.
- Spectacle 19.08.1's Rectangular Region mode works correctly in Wayland when there are multiple displays.
- Konsole 19.12 no longer allows us to create duplicate favorites.
- Kate 19.12 no longer hangs instead of closing when the Escape key has been configured to close the app.
UI improvements (3 for Discover)
- Network disconnection notifications no longer clutter the notification history (Plasma 5.16.5).
- On the Discover updates page, a progress bar is displayed when the list of updates is loading (Plasma 5.17).
- When we are updating in Discover and experiencing problems, the error message is now displayed in a pop-up window instead of a notification that disappears quickly - something I will personally appreciate (Plasma 5.17).
- The buttons in the Discover Accept / Cancel dialogs now support keyboard control by pressing the Enter and Escape keys (Plasma 5.17).
- The User Manager page of System Preferences now shows a button to set or change a user's password instead of an always empty odd text field (Plasma 5.17).
- The menu displayed when clicking on the "hamburger" in System Preferences now includes a shadow and displays keyboard shortcuts (Plasma 5.17).
- Regarding batteries, the ambiguous term "Capacity" has been changed to "Capacity degradation" so that we better understand what it refers to (Plasma 5.17).
- The Information Center Power page has received user interface enhancements related to how battery and power information is presented (Plasma 5.17).
- Fictionbook files now have their own icons (Frameworks 5.62).
- Long tags in Dolphin and file dialogs are now elided in the middle rather than at the end so their filename extensions are always visible (Dolphin 19.12.0 and Frameworks 5.62).
- The drag handles in Spectacle 19.12's Rectangular Region mode are much easier to use and no longer become resizable in small sizes (the screenshot tops this article).
The first changes will arrive on September 3
The first to arrive of everything mentioned here will be a small improvement in Discover and the novelty that will prevent network disconnection notifications from remaining in the history, which will arrive on September 3 by the hand of Plasma 5.16.5. Plasma 5.17 will be officially released on October 15. Frameworks 5.62 will be released on September 14.
This week the first maintenance release of KDE Applications 19.08 which was released this month was mentioned for the first time. It's about the v19.08.1 coming in September. KDE Applications 19.12 will be released in mid-December.
The KDE software has improved a lot in recent years, and everything seems to indicate that it will be even better in the coming months.
