KDE Frameworks 5.78 Brings Support for the AV1 Image Format to All KDE Apps, More

KDE Plasma 5.21 features

The KDE Project announced today the release of the KDE Frameworks 5.78 open source software suite for the KDE Plasma desktop environment, a monthly update brining numerous improvements, new features, and bug fixes.

Containing a month’s worth of new features, enhancements and fixes, the KDE Frameworks 5.78 release is here to introduce support for the AV1 image format to all KDE software. The support is enabled by default when the libavif library is installed on your GNU/Linux distribution and lets you view AV1 encoded images in any app, including displaying of thumbnails in the Dolphin file manger.

The Breeze icons theme has been updated in this release with new icons for the compass action and WIM images, as well as an image-missing icon that prevents various GTK apps from crashing. Talking about icons, it’s now possible to set a fixed icon size for the items in the Places panel sidebar of the Open and Save dialogs, and Discover’s “Install” and “Remove” buttons now use the standard style and re-color their icon.

KDE Frameworks 5.78 also brings more improvements to the Kate text editor and other KTextEditor-based apps, which now display the dragged text that is being dragged and support swapping of the selected text with the top item in the clipboard.

The Dolphin file manger received some bug fixes and it will no longer crash when clicking the “Apply to all” checkbox in the overwrite dialog during copy or move operations, it’s once again possible to record custom keyboard shortcuts in the Custom Shortcuts page under System Settings, and Plasma desktop will no remember the custom keyboard shortcuts set to activate Plasma applets after a reboot.

Also improved in this release are the Plasma Calendar widget, which no longer crashes the Plasma desktop and finally lets you display negative years (if that’s your thing), the Plasma panels, which no longer display a strange black line when KWin compositing is disabled, as well as the file dialogs which are can now open files that contain a colon in their names.

Furthermore, the efficiency of Plasma’s SVG caching system was improved as well to make the entire desktop environment faster, and it’s now possible to enter relative paths in the URL navigators used in all KDE apps.

A few cosmetic changes and also present in KDE Frameworks 5.78 to correctly render the progress bar that’s being displayed in the “file is being downloaded” notification, add support for mnemonics to all Plasma buttons and tabs, and prevent overlapping of the name of the current page by the back and forward navigation buttons in Kirigami-based software.

Also worth noting is the fact that the windows of most KDE apps no longer open in a maximized state if they were closed in their normal window state. The most common crashes affecting all KDE software, which occurred when updating graphics drivers, as well as when downloading or updating Get New [Thing] content, were fixed as well.

There are more than 200 changes in this release, so check out the full changelog for more details. Meanwhile, keep an eye on the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution for the KDE Frameworks 5.78 packages and update as soon as possible.

Image credits: KDE Project

Last updated 3 years ago

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