One more week, Nate Graham brings us information what the team of developers is working on KDE Community. Personally, I think this time he doesn't mention as many changes as on other occasions. It would be in the average, but in the section in which there are more points is in the one of new functions. In other weeks, the new functions that advance us for the KDE desktop are usually three or four, but this time they have mentioned a total of 8, which would be double.
Among these new functions we have some more striking, such as that Konsole will show a floating window with an image when we hover the cursor over a file of this type, and others less striking but more useful, such as that we can configure the speed of the panel cursor touch in a much more granular way. Below you have the full list of changes that have advanced to us a few moments ago.
New features coming to the KDE desktop soon
- Okular's annotation toolbar has been completely redone and is now much easier to discover and easier to use. This enhancement has been in development for over a year (Okular 1.11.0).
- Konsole now shows a preview image for image files when hovering over a link (Konsole 20.08.0)
- Center click now works in Wayland (Plasma 5.20.0).
- Changing screen brightness now smoothly animates the transition instead of jumping from one brightness level to another (Plasma 5.20.0).
- It is now possible to adjust the balance of individual speaker elements (Plasma 5.20):
- File pickers displayed by Flatpak applications now implement the "choices" element of the file picker specification and can therefore receive custom views from within the application itself (Plasma 5.20.0).
- The web browser widget now has a user configurable zoom setting (Plasma 5.20.0).
- Touchpad cursor speed settings can now be configured much more granularly if desired (Plasma 5.20.0).
Bug fixes and performance and interface improvements
- Dolphin now shows progress notifications for duplicate files when duplication takes more than a moment (Dolphin 20.04.2).
- When using an alternate input method, Konsole now displays the input method window just below the cursor, where it is supposed to be (Konsole 20.08.0).
- Spectacle no longer closes when the notification displayed for the latest screenshot (Spectacle 20.08.0) disappears.
- The KRunner window now appears in the correct place when using a top panel in Wayland (Plasma 5.20).
- Folder previews no longer allow embedded thumbnails to slide out of view when they are too tall or too wide (Dolphin 20.08.0).
- Dolphin's free spacebar is now the correct size regardless of font settings (Dolphin 20.08.0).
- Yakuake no longer unconditionally changes terminals when Shift + Tab is pressed, unless you actually set it as a keyboard shortcut (Yakuake 20.08.0).
- Okular's main window has received a visual overhaul, resulting in a new default toolbar layout and hides the page bar at the bottom of the window by default (Okular 1.11.0).
- Properties menu items / actions in Okular and Gwenview can now be activated using the standard keyboard shortcut Alt + Return, just like in Dolphin (Okular 1.11.0 and Gwenview 20.08.0).
- Okular now makes it easy to view all page sizes in a document with more than one page size (Okular 1.11.0).
- It is now possible to explicitly set the size of the systray icons (Plasma 5.20).
- KRunner's recent documents feature now uses the same data store as everything else with a "recent documents" feature, making your results more consistent and relevant (Plasma 5.20).
- The overwrite dialog now makes it clear when the file to be overwritten has a file size that differs by less than one kilobyte (Frameworks 5.71).
When will all this get to the KDE desktop
plasma 5.19.0 will arrive on June 9. The next big release, Plasma 5.20 will arrive on October 13. On the other hand, KDE Applications 20.04.2 will arrive on June 11, but the release date of 20.08.0 remains unconfirmed. KDE Frameworks 5.71 will 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.