by 
The KDE Project announced today the general availability of the KDE Frameworks 5.96 open-source collection of add-on libraries to Qt that provide commonly needed functionality for the KDE Plasma desktop environment and KDE apps.
KDE Frameworks 5.96 doesn’t look as big as the previous release, but it adds some interesting changes that I believe you’ll find useful if you use the KDE Plasma desktop environment. For example, it updates the “Battery and Brightness” widget to also display battery levels for connected wireless touchpads.
While the KDE devs are working hard to unify the “Open With…” dialogs for both native and sandboxed apps (e.g. Flatpak or Snap apps), they’ve updated the “Open With…” dialog for non-sandboxed apps to show you a “Get more Apps in Discover…” button if you don’t see the app that you want to open the respective file in the list of apps and you want to download and install it from the Plasma Discover app store.
KDE Frameworks 5.96 also brings improvements for Kirigami-based apps, especially those that use sidebars in desktop mode as they now no longer “secretly” show an invisible “Close” button in the sidebar’s bottom-right corner that you may accidentally click on, as well as for QtQuick-based apps to make their views where a thing transitions into another thing respect the global animation duration settings.
Among other noteworthy changes, the Analog Clock widget has been updated as well to respect your color scheme, the Breeze theme icon for the Okular document viewer now better matches its original icon, and the Plasma desktop now detects when application icons change on disk and displays the changed icon within one second rather than 10 seconds as it was the case until now.
Of course, there are also lots of bug fixes present in KDE Frameworks 5.96 to improve things like the list of recent documents in GTK file dialogs so that they won’t get cleared after using some KDE apps, custom file extensions when creating a new file using the “Create New File” menu item so that it won’t get replaced with the default one, as well as the shortcut dialog to once again display accurate info about keyboard shortcut conflicts.
Also fixed are the inline buttons in NeoChat’s “Accounts” list to once again be visible to the naked eye, the overlay sheets to no longer have excessive bottom margins in desktop mode, the search icon displayed inside search fields in the Plasma X11 session to no longer look ginormous, and the KMenuEdit and Properties dialogs to let you edit an app’s .desktop file that doubles as a symlink.
There are more than a hundred changes included in the KDE Frameworks 5.96 release and you should take a look at the full changelog if you’re curious for more details. Meanwhile, keep an eye on the stable software repositories for the “5.96” versioned packages and update your installations as soon as they’re available, especially if you’re using the latest KDE Plasma desktop environment.
Last updated 2 years ago
