KDE works very fast, and that means one thing and sometimes another: software improves quickly, but sometimes they have "crashes." That is what happened in Plasma 5.20, although I am personally using it in Manjaro and Manjaro ARM and I am not experiencing anything serious. What did happen is that, according to the KDE projectHis KDE neon did give a lot of problems, but everything was polished in the five maintenance updates that they released in the following weeks.
Although Plasma 5.21 has been something important, both in terms of functions and aesthetics, it did not come with worrisome bugs. Even so, the project that Nate Graham is a part of and on which he writes his plans and progress every week has released many corrections for the graphical environment today, some of them already available in plasma 5.21.1, so we will not add them to this article. Here we will put, as always, everything they mention is yet to come, as we can read in this link.
What's New Coming Soon to the KDE Desktop
- A task manager can now be configured so that it does not make your hidden panel visible when one of your applications or tasks receives a 'needs attention' status (Plasma 5.22).
- They can now apply global themes, color schemes, cursor themes, plasma themes, and wallpapers from the command line, using some fancy new CLI tools with names like plasma-apply-colorscheme (Plasma 5.22).
- KDE applications now support HEIF and HEIC (Frameworks 5.80) image formats.
Bug fixes and performance improvements
As we have explained, there are many changes that arrived last Tuesday and we are not going to include them here. If you are interested in reading them, you can access Nate Graham's original link at Pointiesticks. Other performance fixes and improvements they mention are:
- Spectacle's compression quality setting can now be set to 100% (Spectacle 20.12.3).
- Having kio-fuse installed no longer interrupts KRunner's ability to display man: and info: URLs in your web browser (kio-fuse 5.0.1).
- Key Repeat is re-enabled by default now (Plasma 5.21.2).
- System Preferences no longer hangs when clearing the Activities page history (Plasma 5.21.2).
- Screens on the Display Settings page of System Preferences are draggable (Plasma 5.21.2).
- On the System Preferences icon page, the bottom row of buttons now moves buttons that do not fit in the available space to an additional menu, which is useful in Plasma Mobile in particular (Plasma 5.21.2).
- Kickoff section headings, which consist of more than a single letter, are no longer capitalized (Plasma 5.21.2).
- Systray icons on very very thin panels should no longer be slightly blurry (Plasma 5.21.2).
- Virtual keyboards no longer cover Plasma panels when visible (Plasma 5.22).
- Renaming an image file to have the same name as another renamed file used to no longer cause the newly renamed file to display the wrong thumbnail (Frameworks 5.80).
- The Baloo file indexer no longer tries to index Ninja build files (Frameworks 5.80).
- Closing a "Get New [Item]" window no longer causes the view in the window that created it to scroll up, if it was scrolled to a different position (Frameworks 5.80).
- In "Get New [Item]" dialog boxes, the icon in the upper left corner of each item indicating its status (installed, upgradeable, etc.) is no longer slightly cut off on the left side (Frameworks 5.80).
Interface improvements
- NeoChat 1.1 is available with many improvements.
- Konsole's text reflow feature now works better for zsh shell users (Konsole 21.04).
- Dolphin is now slightly faster to display thumbnail previews (Dolphin 21.04).
- GTK header bar apps now display minimize / maximize / etc buttons. that match the rest of your applications, even when you are using an Aurorae window decoration theme (Plasma 5.21.2).
- Discover's search for Flatpak apps now weighs more title matches and higher user ratings (Plasma 5.22).
- Discover now makes it clearer in search and browse lists when an app comes from a non-default backend (Plasma 5.22).
- Discover's compact / mobile view now makes it clear on the homepage when updates are available, as seen in the header capture (Plasma 5.22).
- When there is only one audio device available, you can hover over its generic name in the Plasma Audio Volume applet to see its full name, in case we forgot which device was connected (Plasma 5.22).
- Notifications reporting some kind of file operation with a known destination URL now always show an "Open Containing Folder" button (Plasma 5.22).
- Spinboxes in QML-based software will now send the newly modified values to the application immediately instead of requiring us to hit the return / enter key or blur the control (Frameworks 5.80).
- When a sidebar is collapsed in a Kirigami application, the content of that application's toolbar now moves much more smoothly (Frameworks 5.80).
When will all this get to the KDE desktop
Plasma 5.21.2 is coming March 2 and KDE Applications 21.04 will do so on April 22. The 20.12.3 will be available from March 4 and KDE Frameworks 5.80 will be on March 13. Plasma 5.22 will arrive on June 8.
To enjoy all this as soon as possible we have to add the KDE Backports repository or use an operating system with special repositories like Kde neon or any distribution whose development model is Rolling Release, although the latter usually take a little longer than the KDE system.
You have to remember that the above will not be met with Plasma 5.21, or not for Kubuntu until the release of Hirsute Hippo, as we already discussed in this article in which we talk about Plasma 5.20. As for Plasma 5.22, they have not yet indicated which version of Qt5 it will depend on, so we cannot be sure if it will come to Kubuntu 21.04 + Backports or we will have to wait for 21.10.