Canonical has released snap packs for more than 5 years. Since then, every time we install an app in that format, it gets us into the folder with the same name that we have in / HOME. In Ubuntu, all folders by default have a picture, like the one for music or pictures, but the one for snap packages is a normal folder. This will not be the case in future versions of Plasma, since one of the novelties that we has advanced today Nate Graham from KDE they are more folders with app icons.
Although Plasma has not been the minefield that it was five years ago, KDE continues to work to improve things, among which is stability. In addition to improvements of all kinds, in recent months they are also focusing on Wayland, and every week there is some mention of something that they have improved in that protocol.
As new functions, this week they have only advanced one that will arrive in KDE Gear 21.12, more specifically that Skanlite will have a "batch" function for flatbed scanners without automatic document feeder. This will automatically take a new scan after a few seconds, to speed up the scanning process for many things. Skanpage will have it soon too.
Bug fixes and performance improvements coming to KDE
- Annotating screenshots with transparency in Spectacle no longer causes transparency to be replaced by a solid white color (Julius Zint, Spectacle 21.12).
- The Plasma Networks applet now allows you to successfully connect to an OpenVPN server with a .p12 certificate protected by a passphrase (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.23.3).
- In the Plasma Wayland session:
- Turning an external monitor off and on again no longer causes Plasma to hang (Oxalica F., Plasma 5.23.3).
- Hovering over the Digital Clock applet to display its tooltip no longer hangs Plasma (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.23.3).
- The show / hide animation of a panel set to auto-hide mode now works (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23.3).
- Pasting arbitrary content from the clipboard into a file now works (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.88).
- Fixed a case where launching the System Monitor could cause the ksgrd_network_helper process (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.23.3) to crash.
- The Minimize All effect / widget / button now remembers which window was active and makes sure that window ends up on top by restoring all minimized windows (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23.3).
- Changing from a panel widget to an alternate one using the "Alternatives ..." popup no longer reorders widgets (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.23.3).
- Switching between virtual desktops when windows are maximized no longer causes the panel to flicker, especially when using a dark color scheme or Plasma theme (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.23.3).
- Fixed one of the most common sources of crashes in System Preferences, which could be triggered when quickly navigating between pages (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 5.88).
- When using a third-party icon theme, the icons that the application requests that are not available in the active theme are now displayed from the specified fallback icon theme, rather than not (Carl Schwan, Frameworks 5.88).
- Excessively long labels on System Preferences grid-style pages are now bypassed instead of overflowing (Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.88).
Improvements in the user's interface
- Spectacle notifications about screenshots taken with a global shortcut no longer show duplicate text (Antonio Prcela, Spectacle 21.12).
- The "large focus rings" feature from Plasma 5.24 has been carried over to Plasma 5.23 as it resolves a number of focus-related bugs and issues and has proven to be stable so far (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.23.3).
- Windows now remember the screens they were on when those screens are turned off or disconnected, and will return to them when those screens return. This should fix a large class of multi-monitor annoyances. (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24).
- Critical notifications now have a small orange stripe down the side to visually distinguish them from clutter in the background and generally to help them stand out so that they are more likely to be noticed (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24).
- With a thin panel, the systray icons now have the same space in "Small" mode as in "Scale with panel" mode (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24).
- The strange behavior of clicking in the middle of a panel to create a sticky note has been disabled by removing the relevant entries from the configuration files of people who still have them there for some reason (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24) .
- The Breeze icon theme has gained a ton of folder icons with various semi-common icons and emblems on them (Andreas Kainz, Frameworks 5.88) :.
- The standard Kirigami placeholder icon for an image that is not available or is still loading no longer looks like the Windows logo (Aleix Pol González, Frameworks 5.88).
When will all this come
Plasma 5.23.3 is coming November 9 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.