14 DAY TRIAL // KDE developer Nate Graham shares with us more of the work done lately for the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.16 desktop environment, as well as the KDE Applications 19.04 and KDE Frameworks 5.57 software suites.
Thanks to work done by KDE developers Aleix Pol Gonzalez and Nate Graham, the Plasma Discover graphical package manager will get quite some improvements in the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.16 desktop environment, including a major usability overhaul of the Updates page to remove downloaded apps from the view after they've been installed and show distinct "downloading" and "installing" phases.
Moreover, Plasma Discover will now display a busy indicator when checking for updates, as well as a real progress bar for the tasks completion indicator. The support for AppImage universal binary files has been updated as well, as Plasma Discover will now display AppImage apps from Opendesktop.org in the correct category, thanks to work done by developer Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen.
The KDE Plasma 5.16 desktop environment also promises to add various improvements to the Task Manager, which will no longer resize remaining tasks when closing tasks using the middle mouse click so you can terminate more tasks quickly, and revamps the wording of the messages received from the system about power and battery, work done by developers Thomas Surrel and Krešimir Čohar.
KDE Plasma 5.16 launches June 11th, 2019
The final release of the KDE Plasma 5.16 desktop environment will be available on June 11th, 2019, powered by the latest Qt 5.12 open-source application framework and the KDE Frameworks 5.58 and KDE Applications 19.04 software suites. KDE Plasma 5.16 will be ready for beta testing on May 16th, and it'll be supported until mid-October 2019.
On the other hand, the KDE Applications 19.04 software suite launches on April 18th with numerous improvements for the Dolphin file manager, including the ability to start it up using the Meta+E global keyboard shortcut, show thumbnail previews for Blender files, properly re-arrange items in the Places panel if there's hidden items, and correctly show monochrome icons.