- As the development of KDE Plasma 5.26 goes on, Nate Graham, a KDE developer is sharing some of the improvements in the desktop environment.
- KDE Plasma 5.26 had received many new features and improvements over the last week, and some bug fixes as well.
- KDE Plasma 5.26 is expected to be released in October 2022.
KDE Plasma, one of the most preferred Linux desktop environments is currently under development for the 5.26 version. The current version of KDE Plasma, 5.25, was released in the middle of June 2022. Now the developers are sharing some insights regarding the upcoming major version.
Many improvements in just one week
In the last week of KDE Plasma development, the developers have added a highlight effect for the mouse-hovered windows in the Present Windows and Desktop Grid, which effectively makes it easier to notice. They added a new loading bar for the app reviews section while they are being loaded. The draggable handles in the Panel Edit Mode toolbar received some improvements as well; they are now capable of displaying tooltips of their function and double-clicking reset their states.
Some tweaks have been made for sandboxed applications’ screen recording capabilities for KDE Plasma 5.26. Additionally, Comic Strip and Paper widgets have now some little changes; Comic Strip had its “Run associated application” context menu item renamed “Open in browser”, and Paper has new transition animations. Finally, this week’s development delivers some performance improvements as well.
Some KDE Frameworks 5.97 tweaks of this week have been revealed as well. The non-EXIF metadata stored inside PNG images can now be displayed in the Properties dialog and the GPS coordinates generate a clickable link.
It’s not the full changelog for 5.26
Keep in mind that those are the changes for only this week, not the full changelog. Many additional features and tweaks have been revealed by Nate Graham, a KDE developer before the last week as well. Some of the notable new features are;
- More capable “About This System” dialog that supports more hardware and firmware, including Apple M1 CPUs.
- Wallpaper dialog now displays metadata when available.
- Navigating between virtual desktops’ “rolling back to the first one after the last one” feature is now optional.
- You can use middle-click to close the windows in the Desktop Grid.
- Improved KRunner search results’ ordering.
- Animated images can now be used as wallpapers, even in a part of a slideshow.
- Separate wallpapers can now be assigned for Light and Dark themes.
- A new option to disable middle-click paste in the Plasma Wayland session.
- The Formats and Languages pages in the Systems are now merged.
Since the development is ongoing, there will be more tweaks and features in the final release of KDE Plasma 5.26. The final version is expected to be released on the 11th of October, 2022.