One more Saturday, Nate Graham from the KDE project, posted an article with the news that he, his team and third-party collaborators are working on. One of the novelties that they already have prepared is something that, honestly, I had been thinking about for a long time. In the task manager, when we hover the mouse over an app we see a thumbnail of it, and in those that play multimedia content, a track can be advanced or delayed.
I've ever been left with the feeling that something was missing, but what? Probably the only new feature that we got ahead of today: starting with Plasma 5.24, the Thumbnails of this type of apps in the task manager will allow us to raise and lower the volume of the audio, as shown in the header capture (not to mention that I have used Graham's image to complete mine ...). They don't mention it, but we can probably control the volume with the mouse wheel or two fingers on the trackpad.
Bug fixes coming to KDE
- Okular no longer renders fictional documents with incorrect whitespace in certain places, and now displays your keywords in the properties dialog (Yuri Chornoivan and Lenny Soshinskiy, Okular 22.04).
- Okular no longer loses memory when viewing documents with Optional Content links (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 22.04).
- Connectivity with MTP devices now works much better in general: they are now displayed correctly in the Disks and Devices applet, opening one in Dolphin now updates the view automatically when following the instructions provided unlocking the device and allowing access, and the Instructions are now clearer and more actionable (Harald Sitter, James John, and Nate Graham-but actually mostly the first two, Plasma 5.24 and Dolphin 22.04).
- Turning a monitor off and on again no longer causes some windows to resize (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24).
- Clicking the Pause button on the System Preferences File Search page now actually stops indexing (Yerrey Dev, Plasma 5.24).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, a case has been fixed where window thumbnails might not appear in Task Manager tooltips with certain settings (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24).
- The kimpanel popup no longer flickers when entering CJK text (Rocket Aaron, Plasma 5.24).
- Now you can change the user or group of a file or folder on the desktop (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.91).
- Snap apps no longer appear inappropriately as mounted volumes in Places panels (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.91).
- Key remapping with the System Preferences Advanced Keyboard page now makes any swapped modifier keys correctly handled by global keyboard shortcuts (Fabian Vogt, Frameworks 5.90).
Improvements in the user's interface
- The Battery and Brightness applet now becomes just a Brightness applet on computers without batteries but with brightness controls (Aleix Pol González, Plasma 5.24).
- Plasma applets with scrollable views now use a more consistent style (Carl Schwan, Plasma 5.24).
- The Scale effect is now used by default for opening and closing windows, instead of the old Fade effect (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24).
- Items are now selected after being moved or created on the desktop (Derek Christ, Plasma 5.24).
- You can now see the network speed in bits per second in the System Monitor applets and in the application (Vishal Rao, Plasma 5.24).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, the systray item to show and hide the virtual keyboard now only activates in tablet mode (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24).
- When auto-login is enabled, it now warns of some changes that could be made to the KWallet configuration (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24).
- Scrollable controls in Plasma and other QtQuick-based applications now only change their content when hovering over them if the cursor started over them, not when the cursor passed over them because the view they live in moved while scrolling (Noah Davis , Frameworks 5.90 with Plasma 5.24).
- KDE applications that display relative dates now display them much more accurately (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.91).
- Yakuake's systray icon is now monochrome (Artem Grinev and Bogdan Covaciu, Frameworks 5.91.
- Menus in QtQuick applications now have the same size and appearance as menus in QtWidgets applications (Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.91).
- Sliders in QtQuick applications can now be manipulated by hovering over them, as can sliders elsewhere (Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.91).
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.24 will arrive on February 8, and KDE Frameworks 5.90 will do so later today. Frameworks 5.91 will arrive as early as next month, on February 12. KDE Gear 22.04 does not have a scheduled date yet, or the official website does not pick it up. If any reader finds out about something posted on an unofficial "wall", as has happened at some time in the past, it would be appreciated if they would leave the information in the comments.
To enjoy all this as soon as possible we have to add the repository backports from KDE 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.