In a few days, which will last for weeks, in which the Coronavirus appears in all the media, here we are only going to mention it to say that, thank God Torvalds, it seems that, after a last week looser, it is not affecting the developers at all and the work of KDE. Although this time they have not published a huge article as on other occasions, Nate Graham has returned to advance us a good number of novelties in which they are working and will arrive in the medium term future.
Graham mentions in the headline of his article that they are going to polish the system tray of Plasma. The intention is that all the articles of what in English is known as "System Tray" are more uniform, something to which I think it will contribute, for example and among other things, that Telegram has a monochrome icon and not a full color icon like the one we have right now. Graham expects this polish to be complete by the Plasma 5.19.0 release.
New features being prepared by KDE
- Yakuake's window can now be resized vertically by dragging its bottom bar (Yakuake 20.04.0).
- New tabs or split view panels in Yakuake can now start in the same directory as the current tab / split (Yakuake 20.04.0).
- Elisa can now be configured not to use the Baloo file indexing service, even if it is available (Elisa 20.04.0).
Bug fixes and performance and interface improvements
Already available since last Tuesday:
- Discover no longer hangs on launch under certain circumstances (Plasma 5.18.3).
- Discover no longer crashes when you cancel the installation of a Flatpak package while its description page is open (Plasma 5.18.3).
Future news:
- The System Configuration Printers page will now prompt you for authentication when you try to add a printer, but are not currently authorized to do so, rather than just failing (Print Manager 20.04.0).
- The Printers applet no longer has strange misalignment and mouseover behavior (Print Manager 20.04.0).
- When editing a panel, the small pop-up window to configure individual applets no longer disappears the moment you move the pointer over it (Plasma 5.18.4).
- When changing the cursor theme, GTK3 applications now reflect that change immediately (Plasma 5.19.0).
- Various parts of Plasma and KDE applications that use shaded rectangles are now significantly more effective and require fewer resources thanks to the use of a new custom shader implementation (Frameworks 5.59 and Plasma 5.19).
- Kamoso no longer has an extra burger menu that does nothing (Frameworks 5.69).
- The System Preferences online account integration page has been completely overhauled and now has a clean, modern user interface with much more reliable functionality (kaccounts-integration 20.04.0).
- After installing Samba using the Sharing tab of the Properties window, it now recommends rebooting for group membership changes to take effect, and provides a button to allow you to reboot with one click (Dolphin 20.04.0).
- The Rel Clock applet popup has received a visual update and now displays world clocks (Plasma 5.19.0)
- Systray pop-ups now have a different "header" area where the title and the Pin button (Pslama 5.19.0).
- Systray pop-ups for Bluetooth and networks now use a nicer and more consistent highlighting style (Plasma 5.19.0).
- The systray icon for Flameshot is now monochrome and matches the rest of the icons (Frameworks 5.69).
When will all this come
Of all the above and as we have indicated, there are a couple of new features available since last Tuesday, coinciding with the release of Plasma 5.18.3. Of the rest of the improvements, the first to arrive will do so on March 31, coinciding with the launch of plasma 5.18.4. Frameworks 11 will arrive on April 5.69 and shortly after, on April 23, KDE Applications 20.04.0 will arrive. To finish and following the chronological order, Plasma 5.19.0 will land on June 9.
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.