KDE Frameworks 5.76 Released with More Improvements for Plasma Desktop and Apps

KDE Plasma 5.20

The KDE Project released today KDE Frameworks 5.76.0, a new version of their collection of more than 70 add-on libraries to Qt providing a wide range of commonly needed functionality for the Plasma desktop and apps.

As expected for a monthly update, KDE Frameworks 5.76 is packed with numerous improvements and bug fixes designed to make your Plasma desktop experience more enjoyable, as well as more stable, secure and reliable.

Highlights include support for 16-bit PSD files for thumbnails and previews throughout KDE apps, full support for the KIO library to preserve extended attributes during common file manipulation operations, as well as the ability for the file Open/Save dialogs to correctly handle file names containing the “#” character and to redirect users to an existing folder instead of showing an error message when they try to create one with the same name.

Several improvements are present for Kirigami-based apps, such as support for draggable list items to use the grabby hand cursor when the cursor is hovered over them, better RTL (Right-to-Left) support for the sidebar layout, and horizontal centering for icons in collapsed sidebars.

Moreover, ToolButtons in both Kirigami- and QML-based apps now visually indicate when they have keyboard focus and it’s now possible to close sheets in Kirigami-based apps using the Escape key. Also, the comboboxes in Kirigami- and other QML-based apps now use the correct color, if they have enough items to be scrollable.

Taking about keyboard shortcuts, KDE Frameworks 5.76 improves Plasma applets that have keyboard shortcuts assigned to make them active to deactivate when using the same shortcut, except for the System Tray applet, which needs more work. Also for Plasma applets, their headers now use the correct colors of the Breeze Dark Plasma theme and it’s now possible to close the popups of editable comboboxes when clicking outside of them.

Among other improvements, there’s support for the bracket matching feature in Kate, KDevelop, and other KTextEditor-based apps to match angle brackets, blurry outlines were removed from slider handles in Plasma desktop, and Plasma Discover’s sidebar header no longer partially covers up the first few items in the sidebar list.

KDE Frameworks 5.76 also improves the Places panel in the Dolphin file manager, the file dialogs, and various other places to include entries for the Music, Pictures, and Videos folders by default, makes the red subtitle text in the Disks & Devices system tray applet more readable for devices without much free disk space.

Last but not least, this release removes skipped files in the total number of files printed at the end of a notification for file move or copy operations and makes the preview of different items in the file Open/Save dialogs to always update properly while the preview panel is open and moving the mouse.

Among the bug fixes, KDE Frameworks 5.76 fixes an issue that prevented items updated from store.kde.org via either the Plasma Discover package manger or the Get New [Thing] window to be updated the next time you checked for updates, as well as a common crash that occurred when the user installed or updated themes using Plasma Discover or Get New [Thing].

Also fixed is a memory leak in the Kate text editor and other KTextEditor-based apps, a bug in the Plasma Wayland session that made KRunner to consume more CPU resources than it needed, and a common System Settings crash that occurred when opening various QML-based pages. For more details, check out the full changelog.

The KDE Frameworks 5.76 packages should soon make their way into the stable software repositories of some of the most popular rolling-release distribution that ship with the latest KDE Plasma desktop environment and related apps, such as KDE neon, Arch Linux or openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Last updated 3 years ago

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