Just a week ago today, Nate Graham published a weekly article mentioning very little change. This week, and like every seven days, has done the same again, but going back to talk about a good number of improvements in which the KDE project. From the title of the post and the short introduction, it is already understood that they continue to work to improve things in Wayland, something that, in fact, Was expected.
As for new functions, Graham has mentioned 5 today, one of them that will come from the hand of Framework 5.74. And we remember that, although it is less popular than the graphical environment or KDE apps, Frameworks is an essential part of the desktop and today Frameworks 5.73 will arrive in the form of code, in a few days to Discover. Below you have the list of news that we have advanced a few hours ago.
New features coming to the KDE desktop
- Konsole now lets us darken inactive terminals (Konsole 20.12.0).
- Task Manager window thumbnails now work in Wayland (Plasma 5.20)
- Discover can now be used to update downloaded content via Get New Item dialogs (Plasma 5.20).
- Plasma applets now have an "About" page in their configuration windows (Plasma 5.20).
- Kate and other KTextEditor-based applications now display a zoom indicator in the status bar when the current zoom level is not 100% (Frameworks 5.74).
Bug fixes and performance and interface improvements
- Opening an audio file from the file system in Elisa now works (Elisa 20.08.0).
- Screen switching in Okular presentation mode now works (Okular 20.08.0).
- Fixed a case where KWin could crash when logging out of Wayland (Plasma 5.20).
- In a Plasma Wayland session, XWayland no longer cancels the entire session when it fails; it just restarts normally (Plasma 5.20).
- KRunner Active Plugin List change now takes effect immediately instead of requiring KRunner to be restarted (Plasma 5.20).
- The search widget now respects the current list of active KRunner plugins (Plasma 5.20).
- The pointer cursor no longer gets stuck sometimes when using screen rotation in Wayland (Plasma 5.20).
- Edge swipe and show hidden panel gestures by tapping the edge of the screen now work in Wayland (Plasma 5.20).
- Adding a new network interface no longer messes up the display on the network system monitor (Plasma 5.20).
- Changing the system-wide scale factor now invalidates the Plasma SVG cache, causing SVG-based UI elements throughout Plasma to be redrawn to the correct scale, which should correct a wide variety of minor graphical glitches seen after changing the scale factor (Frameworks 5.74).
- The Baloo file indexer now skips files that repeatedly fail to index instead of repeatedly trying to re-index them anyway and failing in a loop that destroys your CPU (Frameworks 5.74).
- When applying a tag to a file in Dolphin, if the tag menu only had one item, it now closes automatically after applying the tag (Dolphin 20.08.0).
- The current date is now displayed in the Digital Clock applet by default (Plasma 5.20).
- Animation speeds in Breeze Widgets and Decoration themes now respect global animation speed (Plasma 5.20).
- Now it is possible to do multiplication in KRunner using "x" as the multiplication operator, not just "*" (Plasma 5.20).
- KRunner now displays tooltips for inputs that don't wrap completely, so it now has a way to read dictionary text (Plasma 5.20).
- Minimizing a window no longer places it at the bottom of the Task Launcher; now it moves to the next position and there is no special handling (Plasma 5.20).
- Various fixes and improvements have been made to the Breeze GTK theme: sidebars in GTK Assistant are now readable, floating status bars are no longer transparent, window shadow now matches that of KDE applications, and pop-up shadows now they look better (Plasma 5.20).
- The Get New [Item] windows now display icons more appropriate for your update and uninstall actions (Frameworks 5.74).
When will all this come
Plasma 5.20 is coming October 13. Although it has not been mentioned in this article, we remember that Plasma 5.19.5 will arrive on September 1. KDE Applications 20.08.0 will arrive on August 13, but there is no scheduled date for KDE Applications 20.12.0 yet, other than knowing that they will be released in mid-December. KDE Frameworks 5.74 will be released on September 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.