It seems like Nate Graham doesn't get up as early as he used to, but he's still true to his weekly date. This time it has begun entry acknowledging that there have been more bugs than expected in Plasma 5.20, but assures that they are already investigating it to make sure it does not happen to them again. The developer specifically mentions that those who have experienced the worst bugs are KDE neon users, precisely the operating system in which they have the most control.
On the other hand, and like every seven days, he has also told us about the news they are working on, six of them new functions that will come from Plasma 5.21 and KDE Applications 20.12. The list is completed by bug fixes and performance and interface improvements that will be arriving in the coming months, whose full list you have below.
What's new coming to the KDE desktop
- Elisa allows you to change the color scheme of the app regardless of the color of the general scheme of the system (Elisa 20.12).
- Elisa allows you to change which view to show when the app is launched (Elisa 20.12).
- Ark supports archives with zstd compression (Ark 20.12).
- The Inputs page of the systray configuration window now displays configuration buttons for individual configuration applets (Plasma 5.21).
- KRunner can use bangs like DuckDuckGo's to invoke web shortcuts (Plasma 5.21).
- System Preferences now show the same group of frequently used items that are shown on the home screen in the context menu of the task manager and Kickoff, Kicker, app dashboard, SimpleMenu, etc (Plasma 5.21).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- When accessing a large Samba share, Dolphin no longer displays only part of the content (Dolphin 20.08.3).
- .Gwenview sometimes no longer shows the thumbnail strip in a second window when using recent versions of Qt (Gwenview 20.08.3).
- Clicking Okular's scroll track to scroll the view no longer causes the scroll bar to get out of sync when scrolling over the main view using the mouse wheel or trackpad or clicking and dragging or screen gesturing touch (Okular 1.11.3).
- Elisa's "Now Playing" view no longer displays an erroneous "Nothing is playing" message when something is actually playing (Elisa 20.12).
- Fixed a case where the daemon kactivitymanager could crash over and over again (Plasma 5.20.1).
- Blurry and partially transparent Breeze theme menus are no longer sometimes affected by a strange graphical glitch that makes the background look ugly (Plasma 5.20.1).
- In a Wayland session, windows that were closed when in a maximized state are now reopened in the same maximized state (Plasma 5.20.1).
- In a Wayland session, deliberately killing XWayland also does not block the entire session (Plasma 5.20.1).
- Also in a Wayland session, the cursor is no longer clipping sometimes strangely (Plasma 5.20.1).
- The hamburger menu for individual applications in the Audio Volume applet now works again, and the corresponding System Preferences page once again shows the correct output for a multi-output device in the device output combo box (Plasma 5.20.1).
- Non-removable devices displayed in the Disks and Devices applet no longer allow attempting to unmount them and instead display a button to open them with the file manager (Plasma 5.20.1).
- Tooltips for pinned icon-only Task Manager apps, all whose windows are on another virtual desktop are no longer visually corrupted (Plasma 5.20.1).
- The circular timeout indicator in the pop-up notification is repositioned correctly when using a HiDPI scaling factor (Plasma 5.20.1).
- 24 pixel thick panels no longer have the wrong size and spacing for systray items (Plasma 5.20.1).
- The Trash Properties window now indicates the correct amount of free space when using the "Unlimited" Trash size option (Frameworks 5.75).
- Sliders in Plasma no longer have blurred outlines (Frameworks 5.76).
- Sometimes the Discover sidebar header no longer partially covers the first few items in the sidebar list (Frameworks 5.76).
Interface improvements
- When using Dolphin's "remember previous window state" feature, opening Dolphin with a specific location when closed now causes the resulting window to add the newly opened location to the set of tabs in the previous window, rather than replacing them ( Dolphin 20.12).
- Hovering over a tab in Dolphin now displays a tooltip with the full path (Dolphin 20.12).
- Dolphin context menu now shows "Open with ..." menu items even for empty directories, as they found some legitimate use cases for this (Dolphin 20.12).
- The Media Player applet now uses a tab bar in the footer to allow us to quickly choose which of the available audio streams it is controlling (Plasma 5.21).
- KRunner now closes if you press the Enter key while the text field has no text (Plasma 5.21).
- When we try to create a folder that already exists in the open / save dialogs, it will now take us right there, instead of displaying an error message (Frameworks 5.76).
When will all this arrive on your KDE desktop
plasma 5.20 I arrive on October 13, but it has not yet been revealed when Plasma 5.21 will arrive. Yes it is known that Plasma 5.20.1 will arrive next Tuesday, October 20, KDE Applications 20.08.3 will land on November 5 and v20.12 will do so on December 10. KDE Frameworks 5.76 will be released on November 14.
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.