KDE Frameworks 5.80 Adds Support for HEIF and HEIC Image Formats to All KDE Apps

KDE Plasma 5.21.2

The KDE Project announced today the release and general availability of KDE Frameworks 5.80 as a monthly update for March 2021 to their open-source and free software suite.

KDE Frameworks 5.80 is yet another hefty update to the collection of more thanĀ 80 add-on libraries to Qt, which provide a wide range of commonly needed functionality to the KDE Plasma desktop environment and apps.

The biggest changes in this release include the implementation of support for HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format) and HEIC (High Efficiency Image Coding) image formats in all KDE apps, launch speed improvements for all Kirigami-based apps, and better support for Windows apps when installed via Wine.

KDE Frameworks 5.80 also improves search results in the Kickoff application menu to no longer show blurry icons for apps that use pictograms in the .ico file format, and better support for generating the correct thumbnail of image files when renaming them with the same name of a previously renamed image file (cache issue).

Moreover, the Baloo file indexer has been updated to no longer index Ninja build files or .swp swap files, the toolbar content in Kirigami apps is now much smoother when a sidebar is collapsed, and there are few fixes for KTextEditor-based apps to no longer crash when clearing all of their bookmarks.

System Settings received some improvements as well in KDE Frameworks 5.80, such as support for arranging the columns in the correct order when using a large window size and a right-to-left (RTL) language, better alignment for adjacent items in the grid views, as well as better looking standalone settings pages.

Among some of the critical bugs that were patched in this KDE Frameworks release, there’s an issue when comparing two files in the move/copy overwrite dialog that showed incorrect size differences as being 16 EB for files larger than 2 GB, a crash in the Konsole terminal emulator that occurred when searching for new appearance settings using the “Get new [thing]” dialog, and a glitch with the tooltips shown for the buttons on either side of KRunner’s text field when no search results are visible.

A few visual improvements are present as well to make the placeholder text in KDE Plasma’s text fields and text boxes to show the right mouse cursor and color when moving the mouse over it, improve spinboxes in QML-based apps, as well as to force KDE Plasma and QML-based apps to fully respects the animation duration settings or not display any animation if they’re disabled in System Settings.

Also, the “Get new [thing]” dialogs were visually improved in this release to correctly display the icon in the top-left corner that indicates the status of items and to remember the scroll position in the view of the window that created the dialog. For more details, you can check out the full changelog.

The KDE Frameworks 5.80 update should soon be available from the stable software repositories of various rolling-release distributions, including KDE neon, Arch Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Solus. All users are recommended to update their KDE Plasma installations as soon as possible.

Last updated 3 years ago

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com