La this week's note on the news to come to the world KDE starts strong. The first thing we see is a real picture of how what we can call "interactive notifications" will work. plasma 5.18. And it is that the next version of the KDE graphical environment will allow us to respond from the same notification, something that is already possible with an application: Telegram.
As usual, the fact that a software version has not yet been released does not mean that they do not think about future versions, and this week they have again told us about some news that will arrive already in the v5.19 of the graphical environment. They mentioned less changes today than seven days ago, but they also mention interesting things that we detail below.
Upcoming New Features in Plasma 5.19 and Frameworks 5.67
- The names of the wallpaper creators are now visible, as long as the information is available, from the background selector (Plasma 5.19.0).
- In KDE applications that allow us to overwrite the general color scheme, there is now an option to revert the changes and use the general scheme (Frameworks 5.67).
Bug fixes and performance and interface improvements
- Elisa's function to queue all visible tracks now works for all views and with all modern versions of Qt (5.12-5.14) (Elisa 19.12.2).
- Thumbnails are no longer lost, which was sometimes the case. Therefore, the process is left running after Dolphin has finished generating thumbnail preview images (Dolphin 20.04.0).
- Searching for tags with spaces in them in Dolphin now works correctly (Dolphin 20.04.0).
- Removing the screen lock keyboard shortcut no longer locks the System Preferences when navigating to the Workspace Behavior category (Plasma 5.18.0).
- KMenuEdit no longer crashes when creating new entries (Plasma 5.18.0).
- KInfoCenter no longer crashes when visiting the PCI devices page when there are no PCI devices, no longer displays duplicates in the USB devices category, displays the Xorg version information correctly, and now only displays the "Copy to clipboard" button in English »When you are actually using a language other than English (Plasma 5.18.0).
- GTK3 windows with client-side decorations are now resizable in Wayland (Plasma 5.18.0).
- Applications no longer scale incorrectly and inconsistently when using Qt 5.14 or newer and a high DPI scale factor (Plasma 5.18.0).
- Discover now always displays large images when clicking on screenshots, and it is also much faster to navigate between them (Plasma 5.18.0).
- KRunner is now more reliable for finding open windows (Plasma 5.18.0).
- Separation lines in Launch App Launcher now respect the current Plasma theme (Plasma 5.18.0).
- The task manager highlighting effect when there is an indicator that audio is playing is now behind the icons to make it look good on all Plasma themes (Plasma 5.18.0).
- The Users page of System Preferences now allows us to remove a user's email address, warns us before switching to another user with unsaved data, and no longer has a useless and unused "Defaults" button (versions 5.18 and 5.19 of Plasma).
- Elisa now allows us to configure custom images for her favorite Internet radio stations (20.04.0).
- Discover no longer misleadingly displays the operating system as the source of locally downloaded package files (Plasma 5.18.0).
- Disabling animations globally now also disables them for GTK and GNOME (Plasma 5.18.0) applications.
- Clicking the button on the web widget that displays the search field now automatically focuses on the search field as well (Plasma 5.18.0).
- Shadows for Plasma pop-ups and dialogs are now a bit smoother and more subtle (Frameworks 5.67).
When will all this come
Plasma v5.18, whose beta is now available, the 11 February and there will be 5 maintenance releases arriving on February 18 and 25, March 10 and 31, and May 5. The next version, v5.19, will arrive on June 9. KDE Frameworks 5.67 will arrive on February 8 and the release date for KDE Applications 20.04 remains to be confirmed. If it is known that they will arrive in the middle of April and they will not arrive at Kubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa.
We remember that in order to enjoy all these news as soon as they are available we have to install the KDE Backports repository or use an operating system with special repositories like KDE neon