Next Tuesday February 11 is an important day for those of us who use KDE software. It will be launched plasma 5.18.0, a new version of the KDE graphical environment that will add many important functions, so many that they put it at the same or higher height than Plasma v5.16.0. Today, in the weekly article about what's new the KDE Community developers are preparing they have spoken to us of the final touches they have added for this release, as well as others to come later.
That Plasma 5.18.0 arrives in two days does not mean that there has not been time to add new features. Nate Graham has told us that this version will come with a new last minute feature, one that tells us about a rewrite of the Samba status page in the Info Center. Below you have the complete list of changes they are working on.
New Features in Plasma 5.18 and 5.19
- The Samba status page in the Info Center has been rewritten and now really works (5.18.0).
- The default applications page of the system preferences has also been rewritten to have an improved user interface (5.19.0).
- Info Center now displays information about our graphics hardware (5.19.0).
Bug fixes and performance and interface improvements
- Elisa no longer lets us configure a radio with an invalid URL (Elisa 20.04.0).
- The Fonts page of System Preferences now enables its "Apply" button at the correct times, so it can be used again (Plasma 5.18.0).
- GTK applications now automatically use the Breeze-GTK theme by default unless the distribution overrides it (Plasma 5.18.0).
- Application windows now resize much faster and smoothly (Plasma 5.18.0).
- The System Configuration Removable Devices page no longer shows the Snap app mount points (Plasma 5.18.0).
- Systray popup no longer shows blank items (Plasma 5.18.0).
- When dragging a file to the lower right corner of the desktop, the context menu that appears is now positioned correctly (Plasma 5.19.0).
- Correct drag cursor is now used when dragging and dropping in Wayland (Plasma 5.19.0).
- Fixed a severe memory leak in applications (such as Dolphin) using the KUrlNavigator component, which could lead to gigabytes of wasted memory (Frameworks 5.68).
- Canceling a file transfer operation now stops the operation immediately, with no residual cleanup processes that can cause errors later (Frameworks 5.68).
- Improved margins and fonts for Elisa's list and grid view items (Elisa 20.04.0).
- The first time you open System Preferences, your main window no longer jarringly resizes to be larger after half a second; instead it only opens in the correct size (Plasma 5.18.0).
- Discover no longer percentage-encodes insecure HTML characters in search terms; instead it just removes the HTML tags that were accidentally included in the search (Plasma 5.18.1).
- Plasma 5.18's sleek new "Get New [Stuff]" window no longer has an ugly white bar at the bottom, it now has a more responsive default size and its close button always has text (Frameworks 5.67).
- Some commonly confusing terms in various KDE applications have been improved: "Redisplay" is now "Refresh" and "Auto Skip" is now "Skip All" (Frameworks 5.68).
Release dates for all of the above
As we have already explained, Plasma 5.18.0 is coming next February 11 Tuesday. In this article we have been told for the first time about its first maintenance version, a Plasma 5.18.1 that is scheduled for February 18. The next major version, v5.19.0, will arrive on June 9. As for Frameworks, v5.67 was released yesterday February 8 (in the next few days in Discover), while v5.68 will arrive on March 14. As for KDE applications, we still don't know the exact day KDE Applications 20.04.0 will arrive, but we do know that they will be released in mid-April.
We remember that in order to enjoy before all the news mentioned in this post we have to have added the KDE Backports repository or use some operating system with special repositories like KDE neon. If you want to try it now, we remember that the beta is now available.