Having been published on the second day of Christmas, it has caught us a bit off balance, but it has not escaped us. Like every week, Nate Graham has shared another of his articles on what new he and the rest of the KDE developer team, and, although it is true that this time they tell us about less news, we understand it perfectly from what was said at the beginning of this paragraph: we are in the middle of the Christmas season.
Graham begins his article by talking about a couple of new landings, specifically that kio-fuse has launched its first stable version. On the other hand, they also tell us about NeoChat, which is a new application of the project with which we will be able to enter the Matrix network. It is a fork of the Spectral that was abandoned by its developer a few months ago. For me, who does not use that network, it is little news, but the KDE project seems excited about this arrival. Below you have the list of news that Graham has given us this week.
New features coming to the KDE desktop
- Kate now has a new but great default plugin that will display colors for various textual color codes and allow us to graphically edit them using the standard system-wide color picker. (Kate 21.04).
- Dolphin now allows us to set our “home page” to non-local locations, including arbitrary KIOSlaves, such as remote: //, baloosearch: //, and so on (Dolphin 21.04).
- KRunner history now recognizes activity by default. This means, for example, that there will no longer be a data leak if you use an activity with history disabled (Plasma 5.21).
- Now we can optionally (and it is disabled by default) make the system automatically apply the available updates (Plasma 5.21).
Bug fixes and performance and interface improvements
- KRunner, specifically what allows us to search and switch between windows, now works in Wayland (Plasma 5.21).
- Okular is now more resistant to crash against some malformed PDF files (Okular 20.12.1).
- Okular now returns the correct search results when your search term includes the character “Å” (Okular 20.12.1).
- Again, the Dolphin scrolls correctly when using a non-touchpad device with vertical and horizontal scrolling capabilities, such as a mouse with a wheel that can tilt side-to-side in addition to rotating (Dolphin 20.12.1).
- Gwenview’s JPEG save quality selector in the Save As dialog now saves and restores its value correctly (Gwenview 20.12.1).
- Kate’s find and replace speed is now much faster when working with very large files (Kate 21.04).
- Changes to key repeat rate no longer require logging out or reboot (Plasma 5.18.7).
- Plasma no longer crashes when visiting the Units tab of the Time applet a second time (Plasma 5.20.5).
- Systray expansion arrow no longer sometimes disappears when there are only a small number of items in expanded view (Plasma 5.20.5).
- Plasma has been made even more lightweight on CPU resources while MPRIS compatible audio and video players play media (Plasma 5.21).
- The kglobalaccel daemon will no longer attempt to restart and then crash repeatedly when logging out, potentially blocking login (Frameworks 5.77).
- Dolphin no longer hangs when moving or copying files and clicking the “Apply to all” checkbox in the overwrite dialog (Frameworks 5.78).
- The Custom Shortcuts page of System Preferences can, once again, register custom shortcuts. (Frameworks 5.78).
- The Breeze icons theme now includes the icon without image, which somehow makes several GTK applications not crash (Frameworks 5.78).
- KRunner’s System Preferences page now supports highlighting made changes (Plasma 5.21).
When will all this come
Plasma 5.21 will arrive on February 9 and Plasma 5.20.5 will do it next Tuesday, January 5. KDE Applications 20.12.1 will arrive on January 7, and 21.04 will arrive sometime in April 2021. KDE Frameworks 5.78 will land on January 9.
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.
Yes, the above will not be met with Plasma 5.20 or 5.21, or not for Kubuntu until the release of Hirsute Hippo, as we already discussed in this article.
