One more weekend, Nate Graham from the KDE project, posted an article in Pointieststick where he talks about changes that will come to your desk in the medium term. The first thing he mentions is that Plasma 5.21 is right around the corner, but they are still working to make everything work as smoothly as possible. With no time to rest, they are already looking to the future, working on new features and other tweaks.
Much of the progress this week will come next to Plasma 5.22, and we must not forget that that version of the desktop will land after the five point updates of Plasma 5.21, reaching the end of its life cycle with the release of Plasma 5.21.5 May 4. Below you have the News list which you mentioned this week, as one that will improve support for games and apps that run in full screen.
New functions that KDE prepares
- A folder can now be opened in Kate's "Project" view by passing it as a command line parameter, such as kate ~ / path / to / some / folder (Kate 21.04).
- In Gwenview, it is now possible to disable the "bird's eye view" in the lower left corner when zooming in on an image (Gwenview 21.04).
- KWin now performs direct scanning for full screen views (eg games), which should improve performance and reduce latency (Plasma 5.22).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- Gwenview's JPEG quality selector now works again (Gwenview 20.12.3).
- Gwenview now uses the newer OpenGL drawing view, which makes hardware accelerated transitions work in Wayland and fixes various other bugs and glitches (Gwenview 20.12.3).
- The new changes to the Breeze theme no longer cause the third-party Cantata application (and possibly others) to crash on launch, and also do not produce a light-colored line directly below the desired dark one that separates the "Tool Area" from a window (title bar, menu bar, toolbar) from the rest of the window (Plasma 5.21).
- KRunner's match has been restored to its former glory: it no longer prioritizes multi-word substring matches over single word exact matches, and only has a more accurate match overall (Plasma 5.21).
- Fixed screen rendering for multiple GPU output in Plasma Wayland session (Plasma 5.21).
- Firefox now updates its view correctly in the Plasma Wayland session (Plasma 5.21).
- People using weak Intel GPUs no longer experience a decrease in performance and smoothness both in general and specifically with Firefox scrolling (Plasma 5.21).
- Menu items in GTK-based applications are no longer too high (Plasma 5.21).
- Files containing non-ASCII characters can now always be opened (Frameworks 5.79).
- Dolphin no longer hangs when you skip moving or copying multiple files in rapid succession during a large move or copy operation (Frameworks 5.79).
- KDE applications that were closed while maximized are now always reopened maximized, and if they are later not maximized and closed, they are reopened without maximizing (Frameworks 5.79).
Interface improvements
- The menu item "Start a slideshow" in the Dolphin context menu now only appears if the selection includes more than one image or a folder with more than one image (Gwenview 21.04).
- You can now mute and unmute the microphone by clicking its systray indicator with a left click, in addition to a center click (Plasma 5.21).
- A notification can now be double-clicked or triple-clicked to select text like you can in other text views, which is useful for quickly selecting and copying the text of a single code that was sent to you from a website displayed as a notification through the magic of KDE Connect and forward text messages to your computer (Plasma 5.22).
- Notifications for file operations now show the destination as a clickable link, so you can jump right there if you want (Plasma 5.22).
- Systray animations are now more spatially consistent, moving your view in the opposite direction from the icon you clicked. On a vertical panel, a cross is used instead because a vertical swoosh would look really strange (Plasma 5.22).
- The Telegram systray icon now uses the correct colors and respects its color scheme (Frameworks 5.79).
- The Present Windows effect can now be activated when only one window is open (Plasma 5.22).
- Get New [Thing] windows now have an optimized sorting and filtering user interface (Frameworks 5.79).
- Ratings for items in the Get New [Item] windows now show a number that corresponds to the stars (Frameworks 5.79).
When will all this get to the KDE desktop
Plasma 5.21 will arrive on February 16 and KDE Applications 21.04 will do so on April 22. The 20.12.3 will be available from March 4. KDE Frameworks 5.79 will land on February 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.