I have to admit that I felt that Nate Graham has started well the weekly entry in Pointieststick that posted today. I like to have things neatly organized, without unnecessary extras. For that reason, I felt bad when the title bar couldn't be removed in Firefox for KDE, and recently I have also removed it from Thunderbird. If I am not going to use the menus much, I also prefer them to be hidden. That is something that will happen in many of the KDE Applications in the future.
What they are going to do is bring the custom Dolphin implementation to use KHamburgerMenu, which is what they call the drop-down menu below the three lines when it is present in a KDE application. Among the reasons for adding this function there are several, such as security, since they will always be available even if we delete the bar by accident, there will be more space for what the app shows and, not least, it will be reversible. It will be available from August.
Bug fixes and performance improvements coming to KDE
- When Dolphin is configured to restore history on startup, if you start with a URL corresponding to a location that was already open the last time, it now opens and zooms to that location, rather than opening a redundant new tab for that (Dolphin 21.04 ).
- It is no longer possible to use the Dolphin "Mount ISO" action to mount the same image multiple times (Dolphin 21.04).
- The ForsiSSLVPN network manager plugin now works (Plasma 5.21.4).
- Single keyboard layout settings in Plasma Wayland session no longer crash when loading your keyboard options and variants (Plasma 5.21.4).
- Task Manager entries for apps capable of displaying a numbered badge in the corner no longer sometimes nonsensically show a badge with the number zero on it (Plasma 5.21.4).
- Synchronizing your font size with the SDDM login screen now works in the case where the system is using its default font size, but that size differs from the default login screen font size ( Plasma 5.21.4).
- Again, new files can be created on a writable FTP share using the Dolphin "Create New ..." menu (Frameworks 5.81).
- The image thumbnail no longer sometimes hangs when taking a screenshot (Frameworks 5.81).
- The Baloo file indexer can now more reliably detect when files have been renamed or moved (Frameworks 5.81).
Interface improvements
- Gwenview's initial window size the first time you launch it is now a more reasonable 1020 × 700 (Gwenview 21.04).
- Search fields in Discover and "Get New [Item]" dialogs now automatically start a search a few seconds after you finish typing, if the Enter key has not yet been pressed at the time (Frameworks 5.81 and Plasma 5.22).
- The digital clock applet option to always show the local time zone is now presented more clearly in the configuration window (Plasma 5.22).
- When using the Breeze GTK theme, the scroll bars in old GTK2 applications now look more like the Breeze style scroll bars in Qt applications (Plasma 5.22).
When will all this come
Plasma 5.21.4 is coming April 6 y kdegear 21.04/22 will do it on the 5.81nd of the same month. KDE Frameworks 10 will be released on April 5.22 and Plasma 8 will arrive on June 20.08. As for the KDE Gear XNUMX, at the moment we only know that they will arrive in August.
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 or any distribution whose development model is Rolling Release, although the latter usually take a little longer than the KDE system.
You have to remember that the above will not be met with Plasma 5.21, or not for Kubuntu until the release of Hirsute Hippo, as we already discussed in this article in which we talk about Plasma 5.20. Plasma 5.22 will depend on Qt 5.15, so it should be coming to Kubuntu 21.04 + Backports.