KDE Plasma 5.20 and KDE Applications 20.08.3 have been released. Dozens of components, widgets, and desktop behaviors have been refined in this massive release.
Many everyday programs and tools such as panels, task manager, notifications and system settings have been redesigned to be more convenient, efficient and friendly.
The developers continue to work on adapting KDE Plasma for Wayland. Improved touch screen support is expected in the future, as well as support for multiple screens with different refresh rates and resolutions. Improved support for hardware-accelerated graphics, improved security features, and more will be added.
Of the main changes:
- Task Manager has been seriously redesigned. Not only his appearance has changed, but also his behavior. When you have multiple windows open in the same application (for example, when you have multiple LibreOffice documents open), Task Manager will group them together. By clicking on the grouped windows, you can cycle through them, bringing each one to the foreground, until you reach the desired document. You may want to not minimize the active task when you click on it in Task Manager. As with most things in Plasma, this behavior is completely configurable, you can leave it or opt out (see below). screenshot).
- Changes in the system tray are not so obvious. For example, the taskbar popup now displays items in a grid instead of a list. The appearance of icons on the panel can now be adjusted to scale icons along with the thickness of the panel. The web browser widget also allows you to zoom in on its contents by holding down the CTRL key and rotating the mouse wheel. The Digital Clock widget has been redesigned to be more compact. By default it shows the current date. In general, in all KDE applications, each toolbar button that displays a menu when clicked now displays a downward arrow indicator (see below). screenshot).
- The on-screen displays have been redesigned (appear when you change the volume of the sound or the brightness of the screen). They have become less intrusive. If the sound volume parameter is exceeded by more than 100%, the system will subtly hint to you about it. Plasma cares about your health! Changing the screen brightness is now smoother (see screenshot). screenshot).
- Lots of changes in KWin. For example, decoupling from the ALT key for common actions such as moving windows to avoid conflict with other applications that use ALT. Now the META key is used for these purposes. Using combinations with the META key, you can arrange windows so that they take up 1/2 or 1/4 of the screen space (this is called "tiling"). For example, holding META + Right Arrow places the window in the right half of the screen, while holding META + successively pressing Left Arrow and Up Arrow places the window in the upper left corner of the screen, and so on.
- Many changes in the notification system. One of the main ones is that now a notification appears when the system runs out of disk space, even when the home directory is on another partition. The Connected Devices widget has been renamed Disks and Devices to show all drives, not just removable drives. Unused audio devices are filtered out from the audio widget and the system settings page. It is now possible to set the battery charge limit on laptops below 100% to extend battery life. Entering Do Not Disturb mode is now possible by clicking the middle mouse button on the notification widget or system tray icon (see below). screenshot).
- KRunner now remembers the previous search query. Now you can choose the location of the KRunner window. He also learned how to search and open web pages in the Falkon browser. In addition, dozens of other minor improvements have been made to make working with KDE even smoother and more enjoyable.
- In the "System Preferences" window, it was possible to highlight the changed settings. By clicking on the "Highlight changed settings" button in the lower left corner, you can easily understand which settings have been changed compared to the original ones (see Fig. screenshot).
- Autoplay settings pages (see screenshot), users (see screenshot) and Bluetooth (see screenshot) have been completely redesigned and look more modern. The standard and global label pages have been merged.
- Now you can view SMART disk information. After installing the package Plasma Discs SMART notifications will appear from Discover in System Preferences (see below). screenshot).
- There was an option to balance the sound balance, with which you can adjust the volume of each audio channel, as well as tools to adjust the speed of the cursor in the touchpad.
New Applications:
- neo chat is the official KDE Matrix client, which is a fork of the Spectral client. It was completely rewritten on the Kirigami cross-platform framework. Supports Windows, Linux and Android.
- KGeoTag is an application for working with geotagging in photos.
- Arkade is a collection of arcade games created on the Kirigami framework for desktop and mobile platforms.
App updates and fixes:
- Crita 4.4.
- Partition Manager 4.2.
- RKWard 0.7.2.
- Conversation 1.7.7.
- KRename 5.0.1.
- Fixed display of thumbnails in Gwenview on Qt 5.15.
- The ability to send SMS has been restored in KDE Connect.
- Fixed a crash in Okular when highlighting text in annotations.
Source: linux.org.ru