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The KDE Project released today KDE Frameworks 5.74 as the monthly maintenance update to the open-source software suite for the KDE Plasma desktop environment.
Just like with last month’s KDE Frameworks 5.73 release, KDE Frameworks 5.74 is packed with numerous changes, new features, bug fixes, and other enhancements to make your KDE Plasma desktop environment experience more enjoyable, stable, faster, and reliable.
There are lots of changes in this monthly update, but the biggest ones include the ability for QWidgets-based KDE apps to remember their window positions when closed and relaunched on X11, on a per-screen-arrangement basis. This was a highly requested feature and I believe many Plasma fans will love it.
The Wayland version of this feature is coming soon too, says developer Nate Graham who implemented the change. And it will be even better than the X11 implementation as it will remember window positions for all KDE apps, as well as non-KDE apps.
Another cool change in this release is the ability to use global shortcuts for launching third-party apps. The implementation was there but it didn’t work probably, so no it’s finally fixed.
KDE Frameworks 5.74 makes the Kate text editor and other KTextEditor-based apps to open large files up to 40% faster and to show a zoom indicator in the status bar when the current zoom level isn’t set to 100%, and it improves the Online Accounts page in System Settings with support for dark themes when connecting a Google account.
Fractional scaling has been improved to address multiple minor graphical glitches that appeared after changing the system-wide scale factor in the Plasma desktop, the Dolphin file manager no longer crashes during Bluetooth file sharing, and the Baloo file indexer no longer eats up all system resources when indexing files. Same goes for the Dolphin file manager when opening the Tags location (tags:/).
Moreover, KDE Frameworks 5.74 re-implements support for setting up global shortcuts that use symbols (e.g. Meta+! or Meta+&), which can be accessed by holding down the Shift key, and removes an unnecessary horizontal scrollbar from Okular and Power Management’s settings windows.
Several enhancements have been added to the URL navigators throughout various KDE apps to improve the highlight effect when hovering files and folders, as well as to automatically append slashes to the end of the current folder name when typing a path.
Creating new files and folders has been improved as well and Plasma now automatically removes all trailing spaces when the name contains spaces, without annoying users with unnecessary warning messages. Also, it’s now possible to view lyrics metadata for audio files encoded more than 20 years ago on pre-OS X macOS versions in various KDE apps like Dolphin and Elisa.
KDE Frameworks 5.74 also brings lots of fixes and improvements to the Get New Things (KNewStuff) and Kirigamin apps, nicer Breeze theme icons for Godot engine files and the KeePassXC password manager, and more polishing to Global Menu applet’s menus and to various System Settings pages.
The KDE Frameworks 5.74 packages will soon make their way into the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, most probably starting with the rolling releases like Arch Linux, KDE neon, EndeavourOS, Manjaro, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.
If you’re using the KDE Plasma desktop environment, make sure you look for the KDE Frameworks 5.74 packages in the coming days and update as soon as possible. For more details about the changes included in this update, don’t hesitate to check out the full changelog.
Image: KDE
Last updated 4 years ago
