KDE Gear 22.08 Arrives with XDG Portals Support, Markup and Annotation in Gwenview

KDE Gear 22.08

The KDE Project released today KDE Gear 22.08 as the new stable series of its open-source software suite for the KDE Plasma desktop environment and other projects.

With the KDE Gear 22.04 series reaching end of life last month, KDE Gear 22.08 is here with many goodies for your favorite KDE apps, starting with support for the XDG Portals interface in the Dolphin, Gwenview, and Spectacle apps to allow secure dragging and dropping of files into sandboxed apps, such as Flatpaks.

Another cool new feature in the KDE Gear 22.08 release is the ability to markup and annotate images in the Gwenview image viewer. The developers note the fact that the implementation uses the same annotation UI that’s in the Spectacle screenshot utility.

Talking about Spectacle, the screenshot utility now lets you exit the Annotation mode by pressing the Esc key instead of quitting the entire app. Moreover, Spectacle’s window now resizes automatically when annotating a screenshot to accommodate the image at its full size and the utility now shows you global keyboard shortcuts used to open it with various capture modes.

The Dolphin file manager received various improvements as well, such as the ability to interpret dragged and dropped items into an empty area that is showing the Details view as a drop into the visible view instead of the sub-folder on the row under the mouse cursor.

In addition, Dolphin’s “Show Statusbar” action is now also available from the Settings menu and the placeholder message that appears in the middle of the window now says “Loading canceled” instead of “Folder is empty” when canceling the loading of a slow folder.

The Okular document viewer has been updated to appear in the list of preferred apps for opening PDF files externally in a sandboxed app, and it now appears in the “Open With…” dialog shown by sandboxed apps.

KDE Gear 22.08 also comes with an updated Elisa music player app that can now open files from relative paths too and features improved sidebar entries that are now correctly ordered when changing what’s embedded in the sidebar.

Other than that, Konsole now takes you to a particular session when clicking on a notification about that particular session, webcams now correctly appear in Skanpage’s list of scanners, Kalendar received support for contacts, and the comic book thumbnailer now supports comic book files with more image formats used inside of them.

For more details about the changes implemented in the KDE Gear 22.08 software suite, check out the release announcement page. Meanwhile, if you’re using the KDE Plasma desktop environment or any of the KDE apps included in the KDE Gear software suite, keep an eye on the 22.08 versioned updates.

Last updated 2 years ago

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com