With Plasma 5.17 due to be released in less than two weeks, developers are working hard to polish it up. It’s also time to look forward towards Plasma 5.18. Features are already starting to land and it promises to be another very cool release!

There’s lots of great stuff in the apps world too, including that Filelight is now in the Microsoft Store! KDE truly is all about the apps. 🙂

New Features

• The System Settings General Behavior page now has a global animation speed slider that controls the speed of all animations and lets you turn them off entirely (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• KSysGuard now shows stats for NVIDIA Graphics hardware (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0)
• System Settings now has a “Home” button that will take you back to the main page that shows the frequently-used pages (Björn Feber and Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Kate, KDevelop, and other apps that use the KSyntaxHighlighting framework now offer syntax highlighting for Perl 6 scripts (Jonathan Poelen, Frameworks 5.63)
• Kate now allows you to create new toolbar buttons that execute custom actions using the new External Tools plugin (Dominik Haumann, Kate 19.12.0)
• In Okular, you can now right-click on some selected text and easily find other occurrences of that text (Andy Sardina, Okular 1.9.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Discover no longer crashes on launch in KDE Neon. You can get the fix by upgrading manually using the terminal; run pkcon refresh && pkcon update (Harald Sitter, KDE Neon)
• The “Switch User” button on the lock screen no longer gets partially cut off on a 1366×768 screen (Kishore Gopalakrishnan, Plasma 5.17.0)
• Notification pop-ups positioned in a corner are now located equidistant from both adjacent screen edges (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.0)
• Fixed a common KInit crash that could happen when closing Dolphin while viewing the contents of an audio CD (Loïc Yhuel, Frameworks 5.63)

User Interface Improvements

• When the System Tray popup is open, notifications that would overlap it are delayed and hidden until it’s closed (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The Kickoff Application Launcher’s settings window no longer shows a vertical scrollbar by default and looks better overall (me: Nate Graham and David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• When hovering the cursor above a cursor preview in System Settings, the cursor now changes its appearance to match what’s beneath so you can see what it looks like and preview its animated effect, if any (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0)
• It’s now possible to select and remove multiple Bluetooth devices at a time (Daniels Umanovskis, Plasma 5.18.0)
• All of the desktop settings window’s sidebar icons are now colorful (Björn Feber, Plasma 5.18.0):
  

How You Can Help

Check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Get ready for a massive load of improvement! And it’s all pretty darn shiny too because in addition to a ton of work on apps, we polished up Plasma to be as smooth as a marble for the 5.17 beta version (numbered 5.16.90), which is now available. The final product is due to be released in about a month, and as you’ll see, KDE contributors have been hard at work making it as awesome as humanly possible! A few things have slipped until the Plasma 5.18 LTS release, but that’s okay because it means 3 more months to polish them up.

Oh, one more thing before we begin: like Kate, Okular is now also available on the Microsoft store! This work is so important because Windows users who become accustomed to using free open source software on Windows are more easily able to switch to a fully FOSS platform, like a Linux distro running KDE Plasma. 🙂

New Features

• KSysGuard now shows per-process network traffic information (Arjen Hiemstra, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• It’s now much easier to change which device is playing or recording audio when multiple such devices are available (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• Kate’s External Tools plugin is back after an 8-year hiatus, allowing you to extend Kate with custom scripts to process text and files! Personally I find this to be huge, and affords Kate the power of my prior all-time favorite editor in macOS, TextMate (Dominik Haumann, Kate 19.12.0):
  
• Dolphin’s Information Panel now shows live previews of animated gif, webp, and mng files (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• KDE and Qt software is no longer blurry when using fractional scaling on Wayland (Roman Gilg, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• GTK3 headerbar windows are now properly resizable when run with a window manager that doesn’t yet support the _GTK_FRAME_EXTENTS protocol (e.g. KWin in KDE Plasma) (Carson Black, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):

  

• The lock screen no longer freezes and stops accepting input when using a smart card and entering the wrong password with fewer than 6 digits (Jason Franklin, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The Icons-Only Task Manager now shows progress information on the background of pinned apps only when they are currently running (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• Buttons in GTK apps using the Breeze GTK theme now visually show when they’re focused (Carson Black, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• When opened standalone, the System Settings Audio page now has a proper default window size (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• Fixed a regression introduced with KDE Frameworks 5.62 that broke executing Windows apps in WINE (Marcin Dłubakowski, KDE Frameworks 5.62.1)
• Fixed a very common crash seen when creating multiple nested directories in Dolphin or the file dialogs, or when copying files using KDE Connect (Ahmad Samir, KDE Frameworks 5.63)
• Gwenview is once again able to open all .xcf GIMP files (Albert Astals Cid, KDE Frameworks 5.63)
• When you try to copy something to a location that’s not writable, the operation will now fail immediately rather than futilely trying anyway and taking potentially a long time to fail (David Faure, KDE Frameworks 5.63)
• System Settings pages opened standalone in their own windows all once again have correct padding around the edges (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.63)
• Buttons in Kirigami InlineMessages are once again located in the correct place (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.63):
  
• When using a color scheme with inactive window effects, sidebars, drawers, and lists in Kirigami-based apps now become inactive-looking at the correct times (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.63)
• Tabs in tabbed views in various QML-based System Settings pages (e.g. “Audio” and “Window Decorations”) now render properly when using non-Breeze widget themes (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.63)
• Dolphin’s code to generate the window title and places panel names is now more robust, so it shouldn’t give incorrect names under certain circumstances anymore (Nazar Kalinowski, Dolphin 19.12.0)

User Interface Improvements

• Notifications that you have acknowledged in some way by clicking in them or hovering the cursor over them are now counted as having been read, and don’t cause the “you have new notifications!” bell icon to appear in the system tray once they disappear (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• When you ask to switch users and there are no other currently-logged in users, you’re now taken directly to the user selector to pick a user account to log in to (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The KWin Minimize All script and its associated Plasma widget are now more consistent in behavior: if the action is invoked while there are any un-minimized windows, those windows will be minimized, regardless of whether or not the script or widget has been activated before (Anton Smerkov, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The System Settings Display Configuration page has received a visual and user interface overhaul (Roman Gilg and me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The System Settings Font Management page is now High DPI compatible and has a more consistent user interface for its top search field area (Yunhe Guo, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The energy graph in Info Center’s Energy page now has X axis labels (Alex Debus, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• System Settings’ home page has received a visual overhaul and now shows tooltips when hovering the cursor over icons in the “Frequently Used” section (Tien Do Nam, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• Discover is now more clear about what’s going on when an updated app or package has the same version number for its old and new versions (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• KRunner can now be invoked with the Meta+Space shortcut as well (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The Networks widget will now indicate any potential connectivity problems in its tooltip (Jan Grulich, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The Cuttlefish icon viewer app has received a user interface overhaul that practically amounts to rewriting the app from scratch! It now looks better, performs better, has more features, uses modern technology, and has a much cleaner codebase (Carson Black, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The names of KWin’s window placement modes have been improved so it’s now easier to tell what some of them actually do (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Items in the System Tray are now arranged in a consistent and unchanging way (Radek Hušek, KDE Plasma 5.18.0)
• Searching for a network share in KRunner or the any of the Application Launcher menus using \\sharename syntax now shows any matches at the top of the list, not the bottom (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.63)
• The “Full Screen Mode” menu item in various KDE apps now lives at the bottom of the View menu, rather than in the Settings menu (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.63):
  
• The “Refresh” and “Stop” buttons in the Properties dialog now have icons (Tien Do Nam, KDE Frameworks 5.63):
  
• Dolphin’s hamburger menu and context menus have been cleaned up and now feature coherent grouping in sections, a more focused and curated assortment of Dolphin’s functionality, better item text, and icons for everything (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  
  
• Kirigami now has a new toolbar style that can optionally center the actions for desktop apps, and the Kamoso webcam app now makes use of it and shows you a desktop-specific UI when running on the desktop, for improved aesthetics and convergence (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.63 and Kamoso 19.12.0):
  

How You Can Help

Do you like the idea of enticing Windows users by making KDE apps more available to them? If so, check out this post by Kate developer Christoph Cullmann. Relevant skills include build systems, packaging, and promotion It’s very important work, and a key part of the new “all about the apps” initiative.

You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out other ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.