This week, KDE Community He launched KDE Gear 21.08. It's the August update to your app suite, and it came with new features. With that objective already accomplished, the project is already looking to the future, and in that future are Plasma 5.23 and KDE Gear 21.12. Although both will be older versions, the developer team is also focusing on correcting the errors they find, despite the fact that at least in Plasma 5.22 everything was quite good.
Like every week, new arrivals from the list below are the ones posted Nate Graham on his blog. Many of them are part of KDE Frameworks 5.86, the libraries that do not attract as much attention as Plasma or the set of apps, but that are very important so that everything is more consistent and works better.
New features coming to KDE throughout the year
- Elisa now allows you to rate songs online from the playlist and Now Playing page, instead of having to go to the info window to do so (Nate Graham and Javier Goday, Elisa 21.12/XNUMX).
- The Plasma wallpaper presentation settings page now has an option to display all the wallpapers in each folder before moving to the wallpapers in the next folder (Mihai Sorin Dobrescu, Plasma 5.23).
- The Networks applet now supports additional authentication settings / protocols / requirements for OpenVPN connections (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.23).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- In Wayland, Spectacle no longer displays an error message when the process of taking a screenshot in the middle is canceled (Bharadwaj Raju, Spectacle 21.08.1).
- Elisa no longer shows the "Show in folder" button on the play page for radio broadcasts (Nate Graham, Elisa 21.08.1/XNUMX/XNUMX).
- Konsole no longer flickers sometimes when your last tab / session is closed with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + D (Tomaz Canabrava, Konsole 21.12).
- Closing a Konsole tab when typing something at the prompt is now faster (Christoph Cullmann, Konsole 21.12).
- Plasma panel edit mode now allows applets to be moved, configured and deleted on a touch screen (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22.5).
- When rotating the widget on the desktop 90 °, the Rotate button tooltip no longer covers the Configure button and prevents its use (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22.5).
- When the scroll bar arrows are displayed, the arrows themselves now show the correct color when hovering in QtQuick-based applications (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.22.5).
- When the feature of showing pop-up previews of desktop folders has been disabled, those pop-up views no longer appear when dragging something into a folder (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23).
- The calendar no longer shows the wrong number of points in each day / month / year under certain circumstances when pinned open (Eugene Popov, Frameworks 5.86).
- When attempting to move or copy a file or folder to a different file system that has incompatible characters in its name for that file system, this fact is now warned and given the opportunity to correct it, rather than the files or folders are silently transferred with invalid characters and cannot be opened (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.86).
- The "Allow folder expansion" option in the opening / saving dialogs is now respected in all relevant contexts (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.86).
- QtQuick-based System Preferences page headers no longer disappear when scrolling the view using a touch screen (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.86).
- Scroll handles in QtQuick-based applications no longer incorrectly interpret a click on the end of the handle as a click on the track (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.86).
- It is now possible to edit the icons of the applications installed on the system through the "Edit application ..." menu in Kickoff (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.86).
- The definitions of "Units" for QtQuick-based software have been reimplemented in C ++, which should provide a small boost to performance and launch speed for all QtQuick-based KDE software (Jonah Brüchert and Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.86) .
Improvements in the user's interface
- The Breeze-style spinner boxes now position the up and down arrows on either side of the text area in a larger, more button-like click area, providing a much more usable click target and also making control friendly to the touch (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.23).
- Updated the Breeze-style scroll bar handle to match the new styling of other UI elements - it is now slightly thicker (although the width of the lane it sits on is still the same thickness ) and looks more visually refined (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.23).
- In Wayland, entering tablet mode with a convertible laptop now makes the systray icons larger and therefore more playable (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23).
- Holding down a finger in Kickoff now opens the context menu (Devin Lin, Plasma 5.23).
- The PgUp and PgDown keys now work to scroll the table views in the System Monitor (Felipe Kinoshita, Plasma 5.23).
- In Kickoff, pressing the return or enter key while a UI control (such as one of the power buttons) has focused on a tab no longer unexpectedly launches the last app centered on the grid or list above (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23).
- The details tab of the Networks applet now shows more information about the currently connected network, when available (Francesco Bonanno, Plasma 5.23).
- The "Public" and "Templates" folders now show nice new icons (Björn Feber, Frameworks 5.86).
When will all this come to your computer with KDE
Plasma 5.22.5 will arrive on August 31. At the moment there is no specific date for KDE Gear 21.12, but they will arrive in December. Frameworks 5.85 will arrive today, and 5.86 will do so on September 11. After the summer, Plasma 5.23 will land with the new theme, among other things, on October 12.
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.