It's Saturday and, for a few weeks now, that means there is fresh news about him KDE world. To be faithful to the truth, the news that reaches us on Saturday is not fresh merchandise, but dishes that are being cooked and we will be able to eat them in the future. Some of what they mention is new and has already happened, as they have migrated from Phabricator to GitLab as a means of debate and development.
But what interests us the most in a post like this on the weekends is what Nate Graham presents to us for the first time. Between what Has mentioned this Saturday, he told us about the first news of plasma 5.20, now that Plasma 5.19 is right around the corner. Here is the list of future updates coming to the KDE desktop in the coming weeks.
New Features Coming Soon to KDE
- When we right-click on an underlined file in Konsole, the context menu shows the standard "Open With" menu so that we can open the file in a GUI app other than the one we have configured as the default (Konsole 20.08.0).
- The free space notifier has been reimplemented as a critical notification, so now it is more difficult for us to miss it (Plasma 5.20).
- The System Preferences user page has been rewritten from scratch, including many fixes to the most common bugs (Plasma 5.20).
Bug fixes and performance and interface improvements
- When a document opened in Okular's Presentation View is reloaded to disk, it no longer repeatedly displays notifications about wanting to open it in Presentation View (Okular 1.11.0).
- Discover no longer always opens on login when session restore is in use (Plasma 5.18.6).
- The "Apply" button on the System Color Night Settings page is now always active at the correct times (Plasma 5.19.0).
- The emoji picker window now starts searching as soon as you start typing (Plasma 5.19.0).
- Fixed a crash when disconnecting screens in Wayland (Plasma 5.20.0).
- The global menu applet now has the correct scrolling behavior: you can slide the mouse to the next menu to close the current one and open the other (Plasma 5.20.0).
- When using a low-end system with only software rendering available, desktop files and folders now have an outline under their label so they are always visible (Plasma 5.20.0).
- System configuration no longer hangs when opening external applications listed in the sidebar, such as YaST from openSUSE (Frameworks 5.71).
- The "Get New [Article]" window no longer displays error messages twice (Frameworks 5.71).
- Dolphin's elision behavior has been refined; It no longer removes long file and folder labels, but is removed on the right and always keeps the file extension visible (if present) after the ellipsis (Dolphin 20.04.2).
- After taking into account user feedback last week on Konsole's colored tabs feature, the look and feel was fine-tuned for greater usability and aesthetics (Konsole 20.08.0).
- When Discover is loading more results, the "Still searching" label is now positioned correctly, and the two placeholder style messages that include rotating busy indicators are now consistent in appearance (Plasma 5.19.0 and 5.20.0).
- The OSD responses for things like changes in volume and brightness are much more compact so that they don't obstruct the main view as much (Plasma 5.20).
- The battery and brightness applet now has a more understandable user interface for displaying apps that avoid hang and sleep, and allows the user to overwrite it (Plasma 5.20).
- Menu titles / section headers now look good (Plasma 5.20).
- Breeze style tabs are now two pixels taller, making them consistent with the height of buttons and text fields (Plasma 5.20.0).
- You are now warned if you try to create a file with a space at the beginning of the end (Frameworks 5.71).
- The mouse icon has been redone and is now distinguishable on light and dark backgrounds (Frameworks 5.71).
- Plasma SpinBoxes can now modify their values by sliding on them or clicking / tap and dragging on the number (Frameworks 5.71).
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.19.0 will arrive on June 9. As the v5.18 is an LTS, it will have more than 5 maintenance releases, and Plasma 5.18.6 will arrive on September 29. The next big release, first talked about today, Plasma 5.20 will arrive on October 13. On the other hand, KDE Applications 20.04.2 will arrive on June 11, but the release date of 20.08.0 remains unconfirmed. KDE Frameworks 5.71 will be released on June 13.
We remember that in order to enjoy everything mentioned here as soon as it is available we have to have added the Backports repository from KDE or use an operating system with special repositories like KDE neon.