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The KDE Project announced today the release and general availability of KDE Frameworks 5.88 as the monthly update to this open-source software suite for October 2021.
KDE Frameworks 5.88 is here to further improve your Plasma desktop environment and favorite KDE apps by fixing bugs or implementing new features. It also makes the Plasma desktop environment a bit faster and to use less memory every time it loads an icon, as well as when accessing files when the system’s /etc/fstab file contains entries identified with UUID and/or LABEL properties.
With this update, the Plasma desktop now saves any changes you made in Edit Mode when you exit it, the Plasma Wayland session now lets you paste arbitrary clipboard content into a file and no longer crashes when you repeatedly hover and un-hover Task Manager’s thumbnails, and you can now double-click on a Plasma spinbox’s number to select it.
This release of the KDE Frameworks software suite also makes all Plasma applets a bit snappier and to use less memory, makes it possible to share files to Telegram when it’s installed as a Flatpak app, re-implements the ability to change the icons of panel app launchers, and improves copying of files from FAT32-formatted volumes.
There are many improvements for the Breeze icon theme, which gained several folder icons with various different semi-common and emblems on them. Also, Breeze folders now respect your system’s color scheme set in the “Selection” color or the specified Accent color, the Windows logo looking standard Kirigami placeholder icon for unavailable or loading images has been replaced.
Also, the 16px size of the im-user-offline icon is now displayed using the right color, colored icons on colored backgrounds in KDE apps now intelligently re-color themselves, and a theme’s specified fallback icon theme is now used for apps that request icons that aren’t available in the active theme when using a third-party icon theme.
The System Settings has been improved as well in KDE Frameworks 5.88 to fix one of the most common sources of crashes that occurred when the user rapidly navigated pages, fix excessively long labels in grid-style pages, and grid items now visually indicate when they have keyboard focus in grid-style pages.
Also improved is the Spectacle screenshot utility, which no longer recommends users to you install Vokoscreen or OBS if they are already installed, the Battery & Brightness applet to display the battery level of any connected graphics tablets, QtQuick-based apps to display the right visual appearance for disabled checkboxes, and system tray applets with expandable list items to make them more keyboard-friendly.
“You can trigger an item’s default button with the Return/Enter key, expand it with the spacebar, collapse it with the Escape key, and show its context menu (if present) using the Menu Key on your keyboard, if it has one,” explains KDE developer Nate Graham.
Among other noteworthy changes, KDE Frameworks 5.88 paves the way towards support for KDE apps to save volatile state data like window size and position in a separate configuration file with the Dolphin file manager being the first or many to come, and adds the ability to scroll over the Plasma calendar view to switch the month with a mouse wheel or touchpad.
There are also a bunch of visual changes to make the Plasma desktop and KDE apps more usable. For example, KTextEditor-based apps like Kate, KWrite, and KDevelop now let you enclose text in brackets or parentheses when selecting the text and typing the opening parenthesis/bracket/etc. character, the “Send to Device” and “Send via Bluetooth” windows now use a more sensible title and more standard styling for their buttons, and the Command Bar in many KDE apps no longer displays actions without text and in alphabetical order.
Of course, there are numerous bug fixes, and KDE Frameworks 5.88 includes more than 370 changes. You can check out the full changelog for more details and make sure that you update your GNU/Linux distributions to the new release as soon as it lands in the stable software repositories, especially if you’re using the latest KDE Plasma desktop environment.
Last updated 2 years ago
