For me, a user who switched to Kubuntu at the beginning of the year and is enjoying it like never before, the technology information on Sundays comes with something special. I'm talking about a new entry from KDE Usability & Productivity, where KDE Community shows us everything that is yet to come to the software it develops. This week is 81 and they tell us about a good number of improvements, many of them in the user interface of their graphical environment.
It is only necessary to enter this link and go down to realize what I am talking about: without reading any of the text, we soon see a Discover a little different, we think about what it will be, then we read the text and realize that the left panel is full of icons. The current Discover displays only text such as Applications, Plasma Plugins, or App Plugins. As you will see below, the new Plasma is much more attractive in that sense.
KDE Usability & Productivity Week 81 - Most Interesting in a Long Time
New features
- The images of a wallpaper in slideshow now allow to configure a short order, instead of always being random (Plasma 5.17).
- Night Color has added a "Manual" mode that allows us to activate and deactivate it (Plasma 5.17).
- The function that syncs user settings on the SDDM input screen now syncs the DPI display and number key lock (Plasma 5.17).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- Anti-aliasing font settings are no longer altered when opening the system font settings (Plasma 5.16.4).
- When using the Dashboard, opening applications with one touch works reliably again (Plasma 5.16.4).
- KRunner is faster at displaying results and inputs no longer jump once we have something selected (KDE Frameworks 5.61).
- KIO's FTP connections feature is more tolerant of broken FTP server deployments (Frameworks 5.61).
- List items in QML-based software that display inline actions on mouse over now have better space for items and take into account whether the view's scroll bar is visible or not. (Framework 5.61).
- Media applications using sandboxing technology like FireJail can be controlled via the Plasma Media Player widget as expected (Frameworks 5.61).
Probably the most interesting: the improvements in the interface
- Network widget Airplame Mode setting now remains after reboots, if Bluetooth is turned off and never appears on systems without wireless hardware. (Plasma 5.16.4).
- The code that controls the positioning of widgets on the desktop has been completely rewritten, which should improve that it remembers the position of widgets, and now the controls for the size of the widget and icons increase in size when interacting with touches, that is, from a touch screen (Plasma 5.17).
- Discover's sidebar is now full of icons (Plasma 5.17).
- The system settings source page now informs us which applications might need a restart before the changes are applied with a message in the same window instead of in a dialog box (Plasma 5.17).
- The new plugin of the Photo of the Day of Unsplash wallpapers allows us to choose which category we want or all of them (Plasma 5.17).
- The audio volume widget now uses the more user-friendly term "Recording devices" instead of "capture devices" (Plasma 5.17).
- Busy checking for Discover updates now rolls slower (Frameworks 5.61).
- Okular 1.9.0 Stamp Tool Enhancements:
- The settings dialog is now more obvious about the fact that it supports user specified images and shows a preview of your custom image.
- Stamps that are not square are not resized to be square.
- Now it warns you that it is an experimental function that may not work correctly in all cases.
When will the mentioned in week 81 of KDE Usability & Productivity arrive?
As for when we can enjoy all of this, there is better and less good news. The best is that a few of them, those of Plasma 5.16.4, will arrive next Tuesday July 30. The most interesting ones will come from Plasma 5.17, the next major update to the KDE graphical environment that will officially arrive on October 15th. Frameworks 5.61 will arrive on August 10, but we'll probably have to wait a few days until we see it on Discover. As always, now that we know what will come, we need to be patient.
