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The KDE Project released today the KDE Frameworks 5.85 open-source software suite, a collection of over 80 add-on libraries to Qt providing a wide variety of commonly needed functionality for most KDE apps, the KDE Plasma desktop environment, and other projects.
KDE Frameworks 5.85 is a monthly update that mostly brings improvements to existing features. For example, it adds the missing network and hibernation-related icons to the Breeze icon theme when it’s being used under the Xfce desktop environment, improves support for recursive changes to directory ownership and permissions to always work, and slightly reduces the usage of system resources for all QtQuick-based KDE desktop apps.
This release also makes reading of global configuration files much faster, which translates to faster startup times for most KDE apps, re-implements automatic generation of thumbnails for items on the desktop, introduces UDisks2 support to make various features in KDE apps that use the Solid library to work on OpenBSD systems, and imporoves HiDPI support on X11 when using the default KDE Plasma scaling system.
KDE Frameworks 5.85 is packed with many other improvements for various elements and functionality of Kirigami-based apps, sucha s close buttons, “About” pages, or non-scrollable views. In addition, it makes the buttons for sensors in System Monitor’s customization UI to look much better, and the traditional in-window menu bars in QtQuick-based KDE apps to look the same as in other apps.
Among other noteworthy changes, KDE Frameworks 5.85 adds a new feature to the “Get new [thing]” window to let you upload your own contributions to store.kde.org, addresses a crash in the Dolphin file manager that occurred when searching for items, makes it possible to select a custom app/binary in System Settings’ Default Applications page, and overhauls the icon chooser dialog to show accurate SVG icons for HiDPI users.
There’s also better support for custom, yet incomplete KDE Plasma themes, improves the text fields across the KDE Plasma desktop to use the correct color when using theme with strong contrasting colors for the window background (e.g. Oxygen), and improves the dialogs for various file operations to word-wrap the text.
Last but not least, the even indicator dots in the Plasma Calendar widget and the Digital Clock pop-up are now more visible no matter the color scheme or KDE Plasma theme used. For more details on the changes implemented in this new KDE Frameworks update, check out the full release notes.
Meanwhile, keep an eye on the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution for the KDE Frameworks 5.85 packages, especially if you’re using the KDE Plasma desktop environment (hint: they already landed in Kubuntu 21.04’s backports PPA).
Last updated 3 years ago
