True to his weekly quote, Nate Graham has posted an entry telling us about the what's new KDE is working on. As always, you have mentioned many bug fixes and performance and interface improvements, but also several new features, among which we have two for the Dolphin file manager and one for Elisa, which has become the default music player for operating systems like Kubuntu.
If we were to say an app that you paid special attention to this week, that app would be Dolphin. In addition to two new features, they have also mentioned several fixes that will arrive in KDE Applications 20.04.1 and in the application set that will arrive already in August of this year. Below you have the full list of changes they have posted en pointieststick.com.
New Features Coming Soon to KDE
- Dolphin can now optionally calculate and display folder sizes on disk in Details view (Dolphin 20.08.0).
- Dolphin service menu plugins that require running a script or installing a distribution package can now be installed directly from the "Get New [Thing]" window without manual steps (Dolphin 20.08.0).
- The subfloors are now trimmed. To understand this, the simple explanation is that it will reduce many examples of visual glitches in all software running under the KWin window manager (Plasma 5.19.0).
- Elisa and other KDE audio applications now support audiobooks (shared-mime-info 2.0 and KDE Frameworks 5.71).
Bug fixes and performance and interface improvements
- Dolphin no longer triggers a bunch of useless "Examinand ..." messages when connecting to remote servers (Dolphin 20.04.1).
- Resolving DNS hostnames for Samba servers is now much faster (Dolphin 20.04.1).
- Dragging files in Dolphin while using a dark theme no longer makes the file name unreadable during dragging (Dolphin 20.08.0).
- Percent symbols in Konsole marker names now display correctly (Konsole, 20.08.0).
- The Plasma Networks systray icon is no longer blank when a WireGuard VPN connection was already active when Plasma started (Plasma 5.18.6).
- Restoring a Plasma Vault from backup now works correctly (Plasma 5.19.0).
- Fixed a crash in Wayland when dragging and dropping something from a window using XWayland, such as Firefox, to a native Wayland surface, such as Dolphin or Plasma (Plasma 5.19.0).
- Fixed a common crash on the System Preferences display settings page when configuring displays (Plasma 5.19.0).
- Adjusting the icon size of an icon grid view in a Folder View widget on the panel no longer erroneously applies that size to the list view (Plasma 5.19.0).
- Uninstalling installed third-party Dolphin services now works (Frameworks 5.70).
- Installing and uninstalling content using the "Get New [Thing]" dialogs now works much more reliably (Frameworks 5.71).
- When an item in the "Get New [Item]" dialog box cannot be installed or uninstalled, its status still installed or not installed is now correctly reflected in the user interface (Frameworks 5.71).
- Using "Get New [Thing]" dialogs to update existing items now works and no longer shows "Open Collaboration Service API Unknown Error" (Frameworks 5.71).
- The "Get New [Thing]" dialog option to show only updatable plugins now actually only shows updatable plugins (Frameworks 5.71).
- The Baloo File Indexing Service no longer triggers a brief I / O surge when renaming files, and its database now stores information more efficiently and therefore grows more slowly (Frameworks 5.71) .
- Items in the System Preferences grid view are no longer blurred under certain circumstances (Frameworks 5.71).
- "Print" and "Print preview" are again close to one another in Okular's File menu (Okular 1.10.1).
- The Dolphin service settings page now has a search field at the top to help us quickly find what we are looking for (Dolphin 20.08.0).
- The dialog that appears when we are going to overwrite a file now shows an arrow indicating from the source file to the destination file to help us understand what will happen (Frameworks 5.70).
- Fixed all pixelated icons when using fractional scaling factor in Lokalize, Kig, KDiskFree, KColorSchemeEditor and Cantor (next version of those apps).
When will all this get to the KDE desktop
plasma 5.19.0 will arrive on June 9. As v5.18 is an LTS, it will have more than 5 maintenance releases, and Plasma 5.18.6 will arrive on September 29. On the other hand, KDE Applications 20.04.1 will arrive on May 14, but the release date of 20.08.0 remains unconfirmed. KDE Frameworks 5.70 will be released on May 9 and Frameworks 5.71 should be released on June 13.
We remember that in order to enjoy everything mentioned here as soon as it is available we have to have added the Backports repository from KDE or use an operating system with special repositories like KDE neon.