One more weekend, Nate Graham has shared with the community the news that will arrive in the coming weeks / months at KDE desktop. This week's article called it "New Features Galore," but I think it's half true. What has advanced to us today the corrections predominate, although he has also told us about the typical changes in the interface that will help Plasma continue to be one of the most visual and customizable graphical environments in the entire Linux world.
As for the number of new functions, today he told us about four, which is about the average. Of these, two will reach Elisa, the one that has become the default player in Kubuntu 20.04. Below you have the full list of changes they mentioned today, although we are going to eliminate those that have already been released, for example, in software such as plasma 5.19.3.
New Features Coming to KDE
- Elisa allows us to optionally display all genres, artists or albums in the sidebar, below the rest of the articles (Elisa 20.08.0).
- Elisa's playlists now show the progress of the song currently playing online (Elisa 20.08.0).
- Konsole now has a new default but disabled power-on feature to show subtle highlighting for new lines that appear when terminal output is scrolling fast (Konsole 20.08.0).
- Systray icons now automatically scale to fit regardless of panel thickness, and we can now choose for ourselves how many rows or columns to display if we wish (Plasma 5.20).
Bug fixes and performance and interface improvements
- When typing a search term in Dolphin, the cursor position is no longer reset after the results start to appear (Dolphin 20.08.0).
- Elisa got some high DPI fixes related to line weights and icon sizes (Elisa 20.08.0).
- Applying a global theme now also changes colors appropriately for GTK (Plasma 5.19.4) applications.
- KRunner and Kickoff, Kicker and Application Dashboard can once again be used to open configuration windows that are not directly visible in System Preferences, such as the Trash or Breeze theme configuration pages (Plasma 5.19.4).
- The "Text Only" display style for the new system monitor widgets now works correctly (Plasma 5.19.4).
- Fixed a crash on Wayland when activating gear while connecting multiple displays (Plasma 5.20).
- Fixed a bug that could cause Task Manager icons to go dark when changing resolution or displaying the wrong icons when a screen is rotated or unplugged (Plasma 5.20).
- Plasma Widget Explorer just says there is already an instance of a widget while that widget is visible on the current screen / activity (Plasma 5.20).
- In Wayland, it is now possible to enter full screen mode in MPV by double clicking on the video (Plasma 5.20.0).
- Changing the "Confirm Logout" setting now takes effect immediately, rather than requiring a reboot first (Plasma 5.20.0).
- Window decorations now display correctly when using a 10-bit screen (Plasma 5.20.0).
- Cursor theme previews now correctly display real-time previews when hovering over them in Wayland (Plasma 5.20).
- Menu separators in QML-based desktop applications are now the correct height and thickness when using a high DPI display and a global scale factor (Frameworks 5.73).
- Fixed a wide variety of closures, particularly with the temperature widget (Frameworks 5.73).
- KRDC now shows the proper server-side cursors in VNC instead of a small dot with the remote cursor lagging behind it (KRDC 20.08.0).
- Yakuake now allows you to configure all keyboard shortcuts that actually come from Konsole (Yakuake 20.08.0).
- The disk usage widget now looks more like how it worked in Plasma 5.18 and earlier versions, but still uses the sophisticated new backend (Plasma 5.20).
- When using the "Increase maximum volume" setting and setting the volume above 100%, the percentage display for the current volume level now changes color to show you that the volume is actually very loud (Plasma 5.20).
- The old System Preferences emoticon page no longer exists (Plasma 5.20).
- The System Preferences Shortcuts page no longer shows mysterious categories like "KDE Daemon" or "System Settings" for seemingly unrelated actions, and instead groups them all together in a new category called "Custom Shortcuts Service »(Plasma 5.20).
- User list on lock and login screens can no longer be meaninglessly dragged when there is only one user (Plasma 5.20).
When will all this come
Well, so and how we explain In its day, on Plasma 5.19 we can give dates, but there is something to clarify. As for landings, Plasma 5.19.4 is coming July 28, and Plasma 5.20, the next big release, will arrive on October 13. KDE Applications 20.08.0 will arrive on August 13th and KDE Frameworks 5.73 will be released on August 8th.
At this point we usually remember that to enjoy all this as soon as possible we have to add the KDE Backports repository or use an operating system with special repositories such as Kde neon, but this time we will only say the second. Plasma 5.19 relies on Qt 5.14 and Kubuntu 20.04 uses Qt 5.12 LTS, which means it won't come, or at least KDE has no plans to backport. Other distributions whose development model is Rolling Release will be able to enjoy all the news close to the scheduled dates.