KDE Gear 22.04 Is Here with Kalendar, Many Improvements for Your Favorite KDE Apps

KDE Gear 22.04

The KDE Project announced today the general availability of the KDE Gear 22.04 open-source software suite for the KDE Plasma desktop environment with numerous new features and improvements for your favorite KDE apps.

KDE Gear (formerly KDE Applications) 22.04 is here with the recently released Kalendar app, a modern calendaring and task managing application for your KDE Plasma desktop environment that features an attractive interface and also works on the Plasma Mobile platform for mobile devices.

KDE Gear 22.04 brings many improvements to the Dolphin file manager, which now shows thumbnails for EPUB and Krita (.kra) files, lets you drag and drop things from the Ark archive manager onto items in Dolphin’s Places panel, offers improved connectivity with MTP devices, displays the dimensions of images under their previews, and shows .part for partially downloaded, copied, or moved files.

In addition, Dolphin’s context menu now opens significantly faster when Ark is installed, Dolphin’s main view now works better on RTL (Right-to-Left) languages, and Dolphin now produces archives with filenames based on the names of the compressed files when compressing files from its context menu. Also, KDE Gear 22.04 fixes a visual glitch in Dolphin’s main view that could be triggered when zooming.

But that’s not all, as Dolphin’s per-folder view properties now use more relevant view settings in a wide range of locations. For example, the search view list includes a column that shows the actual location of all matches, the “Recent Files” and “Recent Locations” searches now group items by day, the Trash view list view has columns that display the “original location” and “Deletion time,” and so on.

The Elisa music player received numerous improvements and new features in KDE Gear 22.04. Among these, there’s a completely revamped playlist using the Kirigami framework, support for displaying Bit Rate and Sample Rate metadata using sensical units, the ability to show the right names of tracks on the playlist when shuffle mode is being used, as well as support for closing the metadata window with the Esc key.

Furthermore, Elisa’s keyboard shortcuts now work properly in all supported languages, its system tray icon can now be raised to the front by clicking it when Elisa is configured to minimize to the system tray when its main window is closed, left sidebar items are now thicker in Tablet Mode, the view’s scrollbar no longer overlaps the icons when it’s collapsed into icon mode, and playlist item buttons now collapse into a menu when there’s not enough space to show them.

Kdenlive, the powerful video editor from KDE, received initial support for 10-bit color, a revamped render dialog, easier-to-see rendering options, the ability to create customized profiles for rendered videos to adapt perfectly to your needs, the ability to render by zones, and much more.

KDE Gear 22.04 also comes with improvements to the Skanpage scanning application, such as the ability to configure which scanner settings are visible on the Scanner Options sidebar, as well as support for sharing scanned documents, including multi-page PDF files, using the standard KDE sharing system.

Also improved is the Kate text editor, whose quick search bar no longer replaces the status bar when it is visible, once again jumps to the previously opened tab when the current tab is closed, its settings window now fits on the small screens of mobile devices, and remembers the list of opened documents or tabs when the app is automatically closed by logging out, restarting, or shutting down your computer.

The Okular document viewer now opens to a welcome screen when it’s launched without a document and its inline “Save” buttons embedded inside PDF documents now work as expected.

The Konsole terminal emulator now comes with a much-improved SSH plugin with the ability to assign different visual profiles with different colors for backgrounds, text, etc., support for Sixel images that can be displayed inside the window, as well as the ability to open the current directory or any other right-clicked folder in any app.

The Gwenview image viewer now features better shortcuts for the “go to next” and “go to previous” when video files are encountered, tooltips and exhaustive expanded help text to its “Fit” and “Show Thumbnails” buttons, as well as the ability to switch between items using left and right arrow keys when using the View mode.

Among other noteworthy changes, KDE Gear 22.04 fixes a crash in KIO when trying to open an unreadable file in an SFTP location, improves Yakuake’s slide up and slide down animation in the Plasma Wayland session, adds support for more train companies (such as Renfe and Amtrak) and airlines in the KDE Itinerary app, and improves Spectacle’s annotation tools with crop, scale, undo, and redo functionality, as well as the ability to remember annotation settings during restarts.

For more details, check out the full changelog on the release announcement page. The KDE Gear 22.04 packages will soon arrive in the stable software repositories of some of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions, so make sure that you keep your KDE Plasma installations up to date at all times to enjoy all the new features and improvements.

Last updated 2 years ago

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