For KDE users, including myself, there are several exciting news that come to us every month. One of them is the one that tells us about new versions of Plasma, the graphical environment, although lately Kubuntu users have to wait more for a dependency issue (Qt). The other most interesting is about the updates of its set of apps, although the most striking comes every four months. Thus, after the August launch and its three maintenance updates, today the project announced and released KDE Applications 20.12.
Well, it is true that there are outstanding news for everything, but if there is something I have been waiting for the launch of KDE Applications 20.12, it is for what you see in the header capture: Spectacle has added an option that will allow us to make annotations in the captures. This turns the KDE capture tool into a complete Shutter, since many of us used that program more for its editor than to take captures, since any system allows us to capture the screen by default. What will put the new Spectacle above it is that it is already the default app for captures in the KDE editions of different operating systems, so we will have everything in one "out of the box".
KDE Applications 20.12 Introduces These Hot New Features
The KDE project has released the following as highlights of KDE Applications 20.12.0:
- Kontact has improved the syncing experience with Google and now does not use the built-in browser to log in. A new plugin has also been included that allows you to configure settings on multiple mail folders at the same time. Moreover, it also supports the EteSync service.
- Kleopatra now supports more types of smart cards.
- Akonadi has received different improvements, such as support for LZMA compression.
- The Dolphin address bar is now on the toolbar, and Dolphin itself supports touchscreens.
- Konsole now includes a configurable toolbar.
- Various improvements in Konversation.
- Spectacle includes a new editor that allows us to add arrows, emoticons, text and draw freehand in our captures.
- KDE Connect now allows you to download conversations part by part to load faster and more efficiently.
- Elisa, a compact music player, now allows us to change the application's color scheme regardless of the system's color scheme. Now it also allows us to choose which view to show when the application starts.
- Ark, the KDE compression utility, now supports files with zstd compression.
- Gwenview, an advanced image and video clip viewer, now has an option to not automatically play videos in browse mode.
- Kate is a feature-rich text editor. Kate's File Explorer now has an Open With menu item in its context menu.
- Filelight visually shows us how much space each folder and file occupies on your disks. Filelight now comes with a function to save the current view as an SVG file.
- KDE's Nextcloud and Owncloud wizards now have revised visuals on the Online Accounts page of System Preferences.
- KAlarm, a personal alarm, command and email message scheduler, now has the option to use the notification system to display alarm messages. You also have the option of naming the alarms for easy identification.
Soon on your favorite Linux distribution
KDE Applications 20.12 It is now available, but right now only in code form. In the next hours / days they will begin to reach the different Linux distributions, starting with KDE neon and following those that use the Rolling Release development model, although in this second case we may still have to wait longer. Kubuntu + Backports PPA users will have to wait for at least v20.12.1 for the packages to be updated, although we can also install some of these apps from Flathub, Snapcraft or from the project's official website.