KDE Plasma 5.24 will receive support for fingerprints, and other news to come

Although KDE It seems that he is always on full throttle, there are still things in which he is behind other projects. For example, GNOME has long used Wayland by default, and KDE is preparing to take that step in the future. Another feature that's been around for a while in GNOME is fingerprint support, and that's it. announced today it will arrive in Plasma 5.24 early next year.

The implementation of fingerprint on the KDE desktop it will allow us to add fingers to unlock the screen, authenticate when an app asks us for the password and, what is most striking, we can use it in the terminal after the command sudo. It has not been mentioned, but it is probably necessary to use Konsole to be able to make this use of the footprint in KDE.

New Features Coming to KDE

• Fingerprint support (Devin Lin, Plasma 5.24).
• Preliminary support for NVIDIA proprietary driver GBM backend. Overall, this should improve the experience for NVIDIA users in many ways (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.23.2).
• Spectacle now allows you to configure it to remember the last capture mode used for your automatic screenshot at launch, or even not to take any screenshots (Antonio Prcela, Spectacle 21.12).
• In Discover, you can now enable, disable and remove Flatpak repos, and also enable and disable distro repos (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24).

Bug fixes and performance improvements

• Okular's quick annotation toolbar button now opens the full annotation toolbar when for some reason there are no quick annotations configured (Bharadwaj Raju, Okular 21.08.3).
• The keyboard shortcut F10 works again to create a folder on the desktop (Derek Christ, Plasma 5.23.2).
• When the desktop context menu shows the actions «Delete» and «Add to trash» (because both are activated in Dolphin, since its context menu is synchronized with the desktop context menu), both work again (Fabio Bas, Plasma 5.23.2).
• The Shift + Delete shortcut to permanently delete items on the desktop works again (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.23.2).
• In the Plasma Wayland session, the Touchpad System Preferences page now correctly displays the right-click options (Julius Zint, Plasma 5.23.2).
• On certain distros (such as Fedora), when an application is installed with Discover, it can now be removed immediately without having to exit and restart Discover first (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23.2).
• Discover's install buttons are correct again for Plasma 5.23 and Frameworks 5.86 users, but not for 5.87 users (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23.2).
• Plasma now internally ignores the dummy placeholder Qt sometimes creates, which should help with multi-monitor issues related to changing or disappearing panels and wallpapers (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.23.2).
• Search fields in Plasma now work correctly when typing text with a virtual keyboard (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.23.2).
• The Plasma applet configuration window is now able to avoid being cut off at a 1024x768 screen resolution with a bottom panel (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23.2).
• Discover can now detect when a locally downloaded package that you have been asked to open is already installed, so it will display the option to remove it, rather than letting us try to install it again without success (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23.2).
• Kickoff's new 'Keep Open' feature now keeps the popup open if used to open or launch something, and no longer displays apps in the main view of the last highlighted category when hovering over the 'item Help Center »in the sidebar (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.23.2).
• In the Plasma Wayland session, using the 'BorderlessMaximizedWindows' hidden setting no longer causes maximized windows to stop responding to mouse and keyboard events (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.23.2).
• It is again possible to change the resolution when running on a VM (Ilya Pominov, Plasma 5.24).
• In the Plasma Wayland session, the detection of idle time (for example, to determine when to lock the screen to put the computer to sleep) now works more correctly (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24).
• Right-clicking a task in the Task Manager to display recent files no longer freezes Plasma when any of those files live in a slow or inaccessible network location (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24).
• The free space notifier no longer uselessly monitors read-only volumes (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.24).
• Attempting to share something by email when the system does not have email client applications installed no longer blocks the application used to initiate the action (Aleix Pol González, Frameworks 5.88).
• Applications based on QtQuick now show the correct visual appearance of disabled check boxes (Aleix Pol González, Frameworks 5.88).
• System Tray applets that use the expandable list items paradigm now, at last, fully display the expanded view with the correct highlight height, taking into account the user's font size and any invisible items disabled and also, hopefully, cosmic rays and swamp gas (Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.88).
• The command bar of many applications no longer ever displays actions that lack text, and now also displays actions in alphabetical order (Eugene Popov, Frameworks 5.88).
• The whole system is now faster to access files when the system / etc / fstab file has entries identified with UUID and / or LABEL properties (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.88).

Improvements in the user's interface

• The new Overview effect now has a blurred background by default (it's configurable), and also shows a stripe across the top that allows you to remove, rename or add more Virtual Desktops (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24):

• Changing the color scheme now enables FreeDesktop's standardized light / dark color scheme preference, so third-party applications that honor this preference will be able to automatically switch to light or dark mode based on the lightness or darkness of the screen. the chosen color combination (Nicolas Fella and Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.24).
• Lock screen now exposes sleep and hibernate actions, when supported (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24).
• The global edit mode toolbar now offers a way to configure displays, replacing the button to show the activity switcher (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24).
• The "Recent Emojis" sidebar item of the emoji picker window is now accessible when empty, and displays a placeholder message in this case (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24).
• The Send to Device and Send via Bluetooth windows now have a reasonable title, use a more standard style for their buttons, and the Send button is only activated when there is a device to send to (Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.88 ).
• The color picker popup can now be closed with the Escape key (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.24).

When will this all come to KDE?

Plasma 5.23.2 is coming October 26. KDE Gear 21.08.3 will be released on November 11, and KDE Gear 21.12 on December 9. KDE Frameworks 5.88 will be available on November 13th. Plasma 5.24 will arrive on February 8.

To enjoy all this as soon as possible we have to add the repository backports from KDE 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.