KDE Team Announces Major Improvements in Upcoming KDE 18.08 Release

The developers of Linux’s KDE suite have announced a major slew of updates set to be included in the upcoming KDE 18.08, set for an August 2018 release. Details for these updates revolve around a range of new features and overall polish for the core KDE apps including Gwenview, Spectacle, Konsole, and Dolphin, as well as focusing on the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.14 update due in October.

Due to KDE’s open-source nature, the devs also have a site up for people interested in getting involved, whether its simple bug reporting or actually being hands-on with the development using C++, Qt, and CMake. You can read more about their community program at KDE – Get Involved.

In any case, all of the committed changes are great news for a huge range of Linux distributions, as KDE Plasma is utilized in some of the most popular Linux distros like openSUSE, Kubuntu, Netrunner, Linux Mint KDE, Fedora KDE, Slackware, Chakra Linux, PCLinuxOS, and Mageia / Open Mandriva.

New features specific to KDE applications:

• A useful Tools menu in System Monitor that can open apps like Gregor Mi and KDE Plasma.
• Enhanced keyboard shortcuts in Spectacle, such as using the keyboard to adjust rectangular selections.
• New keyboard shortcuts in Gwenview for toggling zoom modes.

Bugfixes in KDE applications:

• Blurred backgrounds behind context menus on the desktop should no longer appear corrupted.
• App icons should properly appear in the Application preference chooser app list.
• Screen edges and corners not properly registering hits when using a high-speed cursor in Wayland.
• A Qt 5.11 regression that was causing KDE apps to lose a range of things like menu bars, toolbars, and panels.
• System Settings should no longer display an “Ambiguous shortcut!” dialog when using the keyboard shortcut (CTRL + Q) to exit it.
• Addressed several memory leaks occurring in Dolphin.
• Konsole should no longer hang when it processes large stderr outputs.
• Buttons in the new System Settings pages should display the proper text instead of their accelerators.
• Dolphin’s selection marker now appears crisper and sharper when using a high DPI setting.
• Overall improvements to CSS support in Kdevelop, Kate, and other apps that use the KTextEditor framework.

Overall UI Improvements

• Plasma will now use a trash icon for any user-action that removes a widget or a panel, making it harder to accidentally remove something when all you want to do is close a menu instead.
• Plasma’s panel widget editing menu received a visual and usability overhaul.
• Labels for icons on the desktop now perfectly align to the pixel grid, improving text rendering when using a non-integer systemwide scale factor.
• Plasma now uses a “broom style” icon for features that clear history.
• Tweaked the new shadows to reduce the size and darkness of the bottom edge’s shadow in response to user feedback.
• Improved the layout and presentation of controls in Discover’s Update Notifier Plasmoid.
• When sorting apps in Discover by release date, Discover now shows more recently released apps first rather than last.
• The Get Hot New Stuff download window now defaults to sorting content by rating.
• Konsole tabs are now harder to accidentally detach, and faster to accurately re-order.
• Gwenview now zooms in to the cursor position when using zoom keyboard shortcuts.

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