14 DAY TRIAL // elementary 5.1.5 comes with a series of welcome improvements for the AppCenter and Files, but of course, as it happens with every release, there’s more to discover after installing it.
As far as the AppCenter is concerned, there’s one major change here: users no longer require administrator rights to install updates.
And while some may think that this isn’t the right way to go from a security perspective, the whole thing actually makes sense because administrators must already approve the installation of apps by standard users. So technically, once a user has already been granted with the permission of installing an app, why not letting them update that app as well?
This is the reasoning behind the change, as elementary co-founder Cassidy James Blaede himself explains.
“Since an administrator had to approve the original installation and we provide clear expectations around curated versus non-curated apps, it didn’t make sense to make users authenticate just for updates. This is part of our ongoing work on reducing authentication fatigue and only elevating permissions when necessary,” he notes.
Files improvements
When it comes to the Files app, there’s one change that substantially improves usability when working with images. Beginning with this release, you can just copy a photo and paste it into a different app an elementary OS would no longer paste the file path, but the actual image.
Of course, if you still copy and paste files in folders, everything works just like before.
The Files app has also been updated with other small refinements here and there, including with more information that should help with file management.
“We now show the file info overlay in the list view as well, i.e. making it quicker to see the size of images at a glance no matter which view you prefer. You can now use the Tab key to cycle through search results instead of just the arrow keys. And when trying to open trashed files, we now show an informative dialog to let users know they must restore or move the file first,” Blaede says.
There are obviously several other fixes and improvements, including for freezes when changing specific settings, so overall, everything in elementary OS should now be smoother than before.