14 DAY TRIAL // With KDE Plasma 5.9 out the door, the KDE development team can now concentrate on adding new features or improving existing ones for the next major version of the KDE desktop environment.
We all know how much work has been done during the short development cycle of the KDE Plasma 5.9 desktop, but KDE developer Eike Hein reports today on some of the hottest new features coming to the next KDE Plasma iteration.
Spring-loading in Folder View is one of them, and it will allow KDE Plasma users to navigate folders just by hovering with the mouse cursor above them during drag and drop. Check out the image and video attached below to see the functionality in action.
"This is supported in all three modes (desktop layout, desktop widget, panel widget), and pretty damn convenient. It's a well-known feature from Dolphin, of course, and now also supported in Plasma's other major file browsing interface," explains Eike Hein.
KDE Plasma's Folder View to get a performance boost
The KDE developer also managed to do some performance auditing on codebase of the Folder View, and he recently made big improvements that will give it a major performance boost over previous releases.
For example, KDE Plasma 5.10 users will notice faster scrolling when viewing folders with a lot of files, much better Plasma startup times when you have Folder View widgets on your desktop, and lower latencies when browsing folders.
Thanks to these massive under-the-hood improvements, the Folder View component should also use less memory in KDE Plasma 5.10, which should add various performance improvements to the Pager and Task Manager, too.
KDE Plasma 5.10 is continuing the goal of offering users a more mature desktop environment, and it should focus mostly on performance optimizations. The development has already started and we'll be able to test drive the Beta on May 11, 2017.
The final KDE Plasma 5.10 release is hitting the streets at the end of May, on the 30th, and it will be yet another standard release consisting of a total of five maintenance updates, the last one, KDE Plasma 5.10.5, being scheduled for August 22, 2017.
The official release schedule shows us that KDE Plasma 5.10.1 is launching on June 6, KDE Plasma 5.10.2 is arriving a week later, on June 13, KDE Plasma 5.10.3 launches two weeks later, on June 27, and KDE Plasma 5.10.4 rolls out on July 18.
