KDE Plasma 5.22 will launch a new page of quick settings and continues to improve the desktop

Quick settings in KDE Plasma 5.22

This team is a factory of ideas. It is surprising how every week Nate Graham publishes an article from KDE project in which he anticipates dozens of news. Even better, the developer says that is just the tip of the iceberg, that there are developers and software that he cannot control, but they work to improve one of the best desktops in Linux, a mature one that is usually available in official versions. of each project, along with GNOME and Xfce.

This week, Graham Has mentioned many changes, among which I would highlight the one you have in the screenshot that heads this article: new quick settings in System Preferences. Right now, when we open the settings application, we see what we use the most in the center and all the options on the left. As of Plasma 5.22, those settings will go at the bottom, while others will be more focused, such as the choice of the theme between light and dark, speed of the animations or the behavior when clicking.

What's new coming to the KDE desktop

  • Kate and KWrite now have basic touchscreen scrolling support (Kate 21.08).
  • System Preferences now opens to a new "Quick Settings" page showing some of the most commonly used settings (Plasma 5.22).
  • There is now an option for digital clock applets placed on a horizontal panel to force a single line display of the date and time regardless of panel height (Plasma 5.22).

Bug fixes and performance improvements

  • By activating KDE Connect's separate "Reply to Message" window, it now automatically comes to the front instead of annoyingly hiding behind existing windows (KDE Connect 21.04).
  • The speed and performance of taking high-DPI screenshots in Spectacle (Spectacle 21.08 or Plasma 5.22) has been substantially improved.
  • Color scheme previews once again show the correct colors in the interior view section, and the preview is no longer sometimes cut off at the bottom (Plasma 5.21.4).
  • In the new System Monitor application, the content of the right sidebar is no longer sometimes cut off (Plasma 5.21.4).
  • Changing the volume no longer causes it to sometimes increase or decrease by one percentage point more or less than the amount you would expect it to be adjusted (Plasma 5.22).
  • In the Plasma Wayland session, changing the random setting in System Preferences or changing global themes no longer causes Plasma or KWin to crash randomly (Plasma 5.22).
  • In the Plasma Wayland session, the Task Manager is now able to cycle through the windows of a grouped task by clicking exactly as in the X11 session (Plasma 5.22).
  • KRunner's story dropdown now always works even when using an old Plasma theme that is a fork of an older version of Breeze and hasn't been updated in a long time (Plasma 5.22).
  • The National Geographic Picture of the Day wallpaper now works again and has been prepared a bit for the future so that it is less likely to break in the future if the source URLs change again (Plasma 5.22).
  • System Preferences now shows if the window behavior page has any modified settings with the usual orange dot in the sidebar when using its "Highlight modified settings" feature (Plasma 5.22).
  • Drag and drop operations in the Plasma Wayland session no longer activate all windows that the cursor passes through while dragging (Plasma 5.22).
  • Pressing the Esc key in the new System Monitor application while a pop-up is open no longer closes the pop-up as much as anything else that can be closed below it and was also open (Plasma 5.22).
  • KRunner no longer sometimes launches applications as the wrong user under certain circumstances (Frameworks 5.81).
  • Unmounting a mounted volume after opening and then closing any files on it no longer gets stuck (Frameworks 5.81).
  • Dolphin no longer crashes sometimes when playing a video preview in the Dashboard, and also uses slightly less memory when doing so (phonon-vlc 0.11).

Interface improvements

  • Kate and KWrite now say what to do instead if you mistakenly run them with sudo or kdesu to try to edit root-owned files (Kate 21.04).
  • The subtitle of Plasma Vaults items is now wrapped, so the following error is never removed before the useful part of the message can be printed (Plasma 5.21.4).
  • The Discover notification now retains its interactive button when viewed in the Notifications applet, so you can click it to open Discover and start the update (Plasma 5.22).
  • Klipper's hidden feature to show a popup with all saved clipboard entries right at the cursor position is now linked to the Meta + V shortcut, so now it's super east to hit that and see all saved entries from the clipboard and call anyone. Windows 10 just implemented something like this, but KDE has had it for years, probably decades (Plasma 5.22).
  • The change in System Preferences that placed the Global Themes item in the header area of ​​the sidebar has been reverted, in favor of a new approach that simply indents all child pages below it. This also restores the ability to click the entire header area to return (Plasma 5.22).
  • The configuration windows for Plasma applets have received a visual overhaul that makes them more consistent with other modern KDE applications and also fixes a lot of bugs, particularly regarding the desktop configuration view not remembering its size and, sometimes it changes abruptly in size (Plasma 5.22).
  • The Highlight Windows effect shown by default when switching windows no longer shows ghost outlines of unhighlighted windows which can cause strange confusion on the screen when many windows are stacked on top of each other in the same position or positions similar (Plasma 5.22).
  • Breeze tabs now have a subtle color line across the top of the active tab, making it clear which tab is active when there are only two, especially when using a dark color scheme (Plasma 5.22).
  • It is now possible to remove installed splash screens using the Get New Welcome Screens window directly from the System Preferences page, without having to return to that window (Plasma 5.22).
  • The emoji picker window now offers an option to clear the history of recently used emojis (Plasma 5.22).
  • The scroll bar minimap in Kate and other KTextEditor-based applications now respects its active color scheme (Frameworks 5.81).
  • Kate, KWrite and other KTextEditor-based applications no longer uselessly ask us to save changes when we close a document that is blank and unsaved, because in this circumstance, there are no changes (Frameworks 5.81).

When will this all come to KDE?

Plasma 5.21.4 is coming April 6 and KDE Applications 21.04 will do so on the 22nd of the same month. KDE Frameworks 5.81 will be released on April 10. Plasma 5.22 will arrive on June 8. As for the KDE Applications 20.08, at the moment we only know that they will arrive in August.

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. Plasma 5.22 will depend on Qt 5.15, so it should be coming to Kubuntu 21.04 + Backports.


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