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The KDE Project released today the KDE Gear 21.12 software suite for the KDE Plasma desktop environment and other projects, adding many new features and improvements to your favorite KDE apps.
After several months of development, KDE Gear 21.12 is now ready for mass deployment with an improved Dolphin file manager that now makes it easier than ever to locate and identify files and folders, shows previews for .cbz comic book files that contain WebP images, and improves icon zooming.
Dolphin is also one of the first KDE apps to adopt the new mechanism for saving volatile state data, such as window position and size, into a separate config file instead of the one that explicitly stores configurable settings. More KDE apps will adopt this major new feature in future updates.
The Konsole terminal emulator finally includes an SSH Manager, full touch scrolling support, and comes with an improved and simplified toolbar.
The Elisa music player has more streamlined options and a tweaked interface, the Kate text editor now lets users open multiple tabs in its embedded terminal views, and offers better Git integration. The Akregator news feed reader now lets you search through articles marked as read and makes it easier to update the feeds.
KDE Gear 21.12 also improves the Spectacle screenshot utility to provide users with more compact settings, including the ability to set an action when it starts up, as well as 10-bit-per-channel color support and support for the “Active Window” capture feature on Wayland.
The powerful Kdenlive video editor received numerous new features too, including a new Noise Suppressor for Voice audio effect that can remove background noise from your videos, improved motion tracking tools, and many other goodies for your next awesome video project.
Among other noteworthy changes, KDE Gear 21.12 improves the Gwenview image viewer to inform users about the disk space an image will take up before applying any changes to it, updates the KDE Connect to let you send messages just by pressing Enter, and adds support for COVID-19 health certificates and vaccination data to the KDE Itinerary digital travel assistant app.
But wait, that’s not all! The KolourPaint painting program has a refreshed look and feel, the Kontact groupware app makes it easier than ever to configure resources and collections and improved support for Outlook accounts, the Konqueror file and web browser now displays more information about certificate errors, and the KCalc calculator now shows you a history of all your recent calculations.
Last but not least, the Skanlite document scanning app now lets you scan documents directly to a single-page PDF and remembers the last-used scanner and image format and offers a new “batch mode” feature for flatbed scanners without an automatic document feeder, and the Filelight disk usage analyzer app now uses a multi-threaded file system scanning algorithm for a much faster operation.
Also, the Ark archive manager can now open zip archives that contain malformed PHP files, lets you create archives using its main UI, and handles archives that contain files using absolute paths, as well as zip archives that contain metadata using backslashes as path separators.
Furthermore, the Okular document viewer now features support for KHamburgerMenu and comes with improved zoom buttons, and Yakuake drop-down terminal emulator gets an improved “Keep window open when it loses focus” setting.
For more details about the new features and improvements included in KDE Gear 21.12, check out the release announcement page. Meanwhile, keep an eye on the stable software repositories of your KDE-based distro for the 21.12 packages and update as soon as they’re available for the best KDE Apps experience.
Image credits: KDE Project
Last updated 2 years ago
