KDE Applications 18.04 is now available for download

Apr 19, 2018 13:36 GMT  ·  By

The KDE Project announced today the release and immediate availability of the long-anticipated KDE Applications 18.04 open source software suite for GNU/Linux distributions and other operating systems who want to use KDE apps.

More than four months in the making, the final KDE Applications 18.04 release is finally here, and it already started appearing in the stable software repositories of popular GNU/Linux distributions, such as Arch Linux. It's KDE Applications' first major release in 2018 and comes with numerous enhancements and new features.

Prominent new features in KDE Applications 18.04 include various improvements to the panels, menus, and folder view of the Dolphin file manager, along with the ability to sort and organize images by date, drag-and-drop optimizations, a new keyboard shortcut to open the Filter Bar, and better HiDPI support.

Konsole, KDE's terminal emulator app, now lets users download color schemes via the KNewStuff utility, and the scrollbar now better blends in with the active color scheme. Also, mouse wheel scrolling now works with the libinput driver and the drag-and-drop menu is now supported under the Wayland display server.

What's new for Gwenview, Okular, Spectacle, and Kleopatra

The Gwenview image viewer and organizer got another layer of improvements as well, among which we can mention support MPRIS controllers, the ability to disable thumbnail hover buttons, several enhancements to the Crop tool, the ability to exit the full-screen mode by pressing the Escape key, and better SVG support.

Users can now cancel PDF rendering and text extraction operations in the Okular document viewer app if poppler 0.63 or later is installed on their operating systems, and the application now offers improved PDF JavaScript support for AFSimple_Calculate when poppler 0.64 or later is present.

The Spectacle screenshot tool received multiple UI improvements, along with support for dragging and dropping to screenshots to Chromium windows, the ability to more accurately adjust the bottom edge of the selection when taking rectangular region screenshots, and support for remembering the last used save mode.

The Kleopatra certificate manager and universal crypto GUI app can now generate Curve 25519 EdDSA keys if a recent GnuPG version is installed on the host system, and there's now a new "Notepad" view for text-based crypto actions. Also, the application now lets you sign and encrypt, as well as to decrypt and verify keys.

Last but not least, the Ark archiving management tool now supports multiple archive formats and lets users cancel compression or extraction operations of zip archives when the libzip backend is begin used. More details about the new features and improvements can be found in the official release announcement.

As expected, the KDE Application 18.04 series will have three maintenance releases, the first one, KDE Applications 18.04.1, expected to arrive next month on May 10, 2018. The second one, KDE Applications 18.04.2, is scheduled for June 7, and the third and last one, KDE Applications 18.04.3, should be available on July 12, 2018.

Konsole terminal emulator
Konsole terminal emulator
Gwenview image viewer
Gwenview image viewer
Spectacle screenshot tool
Spectacle screenshot tool

KDE Applications 18.04 (6 Images)

Dolphin file manager
Konsole terminal emulatorGwenview image viewer
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