One more weekend, Nate Graham has been commissioned to publish a list of news that will arrive sooner rather than later at KDE desktop. According to the developer, and as we can see in the note posted this week, there are improvements in Wayland, but also many that will arrive to its set of applications starting next month. One of them is related to the Dolphin URL bar, where they will make an entered change optional and not mandatory.
As for new functions, this week we have only advanced two, one in Konsole and another in Plasma. The rest are bug fixes and performance and interface improvements. Below you have the full list of changes, among which there are some that will arrive in April 2021 by the hand of KDE Applications 21.04.
New features coming to the KDE desktop
- When you Ctrl + click a file in Konsole to open that file in an external application, Konsole now supports file paths with line numbers at the end (Konsole 21.04).
- The Plasma Media Controller applet now includes random and loop controls (Plasma 5.21).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- In the Plasma Wayland session, Spectacle's Rectangular Region mode now works and screenshots taken on high DPI systems are now taken at the correct full resolution (Spectacle 20.12).
- Okular no longer sometimes crashes when opening a document while using certain display settings and Qt 5.13 or earlier (Okular 20.12).
- After starting Elisa, the first song that starts playing no longer starts playing in the middle if a different song was in the middle of playing the last time Elisa came out (Elisa 20.12/XNUMX).
- Fixed a case where Elisa could crash while playing (Elisa 20.12/XNUMX).
- Elisa's album view no longer has border gaps that allow the main view to display (Elisa 20.12).
- Dolphin redisplays custom icons that do not belong to the current icon theme (Dolphin 20.12).
- When using the old Synaptics touchpad controllers with inertia on, scrolling in Konsole and then holding down the Ctrl key while inertial scrolling is still slowing down no longer causes the view to resize (Konsole 21.04).
- Various applications in Plasma Wayland Session no longer crash when trying to view font-related things (Plasma 5.20.4).
- Double-clicking a user in the new Users page of System Preferences, or clicking one user after another, no longer causes the view to pile up with multiple user pages (Plasma 5.20.4).
- The System Preferences touchpad page no longer has a broken layout for right-click / center-click options sometimes when you open it (Plasma 5.20.4).
- Discover no longer has a crashed process secretly running in the background after you close it, removing one of the sources of crashes / logouts (Plasma 5.21 or the next version of the fwupd library, whichever comes first).
- Switching to the picture of the day on the Lock Screen Appearance page of System Preferences now always works (Plasma 5.20.4).
- The visual representation of window borders on the Window Decorations System Preferences page is now always accurate (Plasma 5.20.4).
- Dragging in the spin box used to determine panel height now always resizes the panel in the direction of the drag, even if the panel is on a top or right edge of the screen (Plasma 5.20.4).
- The magic lamp minimize effect now works correctly when minimizing a window in a task manager located on a Panel or Latte Dock that is offset from the edge of the screen by a few pixels (Plasma 5.20.4).
- Opening a System Preferences page from Kickoff or KRunner now displays the category sidebar if necessary when using icon view (Plasma 5.20.4).
- After applying a global theme, the currently used widget style is visually reselected on the Application Style page of System Preferences (Plasma 5.20.4).
- Full screen windows in multi-monitor setups are now restored to the correct monitor when one of them is disconnected / turned off and then reconnected / turned on again (Plasma 5.21).
- On the Decorations page of the System Preferences window, labels no longer sometimes overlap with buttons in the section where you can choose your own layout for the title bar buttons (Plasma 5.21).
- KWin no longer sets a left edge of the touchscreen by default, which means there is no longer a 1-pixel dead zone on the left edge that eats away mouse clicks and scrolling events (Plasma 5.21).
- Fixed a case where renaming and then immediately deleting a file could cause it to persist in the Baloo file indexer index (Frameworks 5.77).
- Text in various layouts via System Preferences, Discover, and other applications is re-aligned correctly with nearby controls (Frameworks 5.77).
- The "Frequently Used" / "Recently Used" views in various places in Plasma (eg Kickoff tabs with the same name) now show the correct sets of files (Frameworks 5.77).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, some scrolling views in Plasma and QML-based software like System Preferences no longer scroll in the wrong direction (Qt 5.15.2).
Improvements in the user's interface
- Improved gesture-based touch scrolling behavior in Okular (Okular 20.12).
- Dolphin's current somewhat overwhelming context menu no longer shows paste action when right-clicking a file; only when right-clicking on a folder or the background of the view (Dolphin 20.12).
- Dolphin 'Create New Folder' action now uses the standard system-wide shortcut (F10), so if you change the system-wide shortcut, Dolphin respects it (Dolphin 21.04).
- The automount and activities pages in System Preferences now support the "Highlight Changed Settings" feature (Plasma 5.21).
- The blur function used in Plasma and various KDE applications (optionally) is now more blurry by default (Plasma 5.21).
- Text fields in KDE applications now have the same thick focus ring used for Plasma text fields (Plasma 5.21).
- Audio settings accessible from the systray applet no longer have two vertical scroll bars when content does not fit completely (Plasma 5.21).
- Times in KDE use more relative times (eg "15 minutes ago") rather than raw times (Frameworks 5.77).
- Kup backup system systray icon is now monochrome, like others (Frameworks 5.77).
When will all this get to the KDE desktop
plasma 5.20 I arrive last October 13, Plasma 5.21 will arrive on February 9 and Plasma 5.20.4 will do it next Tuesday, December 1. KDE Applications 20.12 will arrive on December 10, and 21.04 will arrive sometime in April 2021. KDE Frameworks 5.77 will land on December 12.
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.