KDE Saw Its Wayland Support Stabilize Nicely In 2020, Much Polishing Throughout

KDE had a very eventful year even with the pandemic where it saw its Wayland support come together quite well that it's usable on a day-to-day basis, KWin has been seeing some renewed attention, and there was much application work as well as fixes and polishing throughout the massive KDE ecosystem.

As we hit the end of 2020, here is a look back at the most popular KDE stories on Phoronix for the year:

KWinFT: KDE's KWin Forked To Focus On Better Wayland Support, Modern Technologies
Longtime KDE developer and former Blue Systems engineer, Roman Gilg, has announced his forking of KDE's KWin window manager / compositor and the subsequent first release of this new KWinFT project.

KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS Reaches Beta With Much Better GTK App Integration
Out this morning is the first beta of KDE Plasma 5.18, which is also the project's first long-term support (LTS) release since Plasma 5.12.

KDE Plasma 5.18 Seeing More Last Minute Work To Make It One Of Their Best Releases Ever
This past week KDE Plasma 5.18 reached beta for this next long-term support release of the modern KDE desktop. While it's approaching the finish line next month, developers have not let up on more improvements in making this one of their best and most polished releases ever.

Linspire 8.7 Trying To Lure Windows Users With Switch From KDE To MATE Desktop
Linspire is still kicking in 2020 as the Linux distribution formerly known as "Lindows" more than a decade ago. Linspire 8.7 is out today with a renewed emphasis on trying to get legacy Windows PCs migrated to Linux.

Microsoft And A KDE Project Spar Over "MAUI"
A few years ago it was GNOME developers frustrated with Microsoft over naming a project GVFS (later renamed to Virtual File System for Git) as it collided with their GVFS (GNOME Virtual File-System) while now there is a similar situation brewing between Microsoft and KDE camps.

KDE Continuing To See More Wayland Improvements, Fixes To Dolphin
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development recap one day early in highlighting the most recent improvements and new capabilities to this open-source desktop environment.

Netrunner 20.01 Released For Offering Latest Debian 10 + KDE Plasma Experience
Netrunner 20.01 is out today as the 20th release for this Debian + KDE focused project over its ten year history.

KDE Starts April With Big Performance Jump For Local I/O + 50~95% Faster Samba Transfers
KDE developers managed to squeeze some long-problematic I/O optimizations into the KDE code-base this week along with other enhancements to make for a nice first week of April.

KDE Has Screen Rotation Now Working On Wayland
Addressing a two year old bug report over screen rotation not working when running KDE Plasma on Wayland, that support is finally on the way.

KDE Working On "Plasma Bigscreen" As TV Interface With AI Voice Assistant
Plasma Bigscreen is a new KDE project aiming to provide a user interface for television screens

KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS Released After A Lot Of Polishing, New Features
The KDE community has released Plasma 5.18 as the newest version of their desktop and a release that is also a long-term support release, succeeding the aging Plasma 5.12 LTS.

Manjaro 19.0 Preview Images For KDE + GNOME Available For Testing
For fans of the easy-to-use Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution, 19.0 preview images as the first test builds have begun to surface.

KDE Finally Has Support For Configuring The Scroll Speed On Wayland
Some longstanding issues were resolved this week in KDE land that will be to the benefit of many users.

KDE Dolphin Restoring Support For Seeing Samba Shares From Windows
KDE developers wrapped up February 2020 with many fixes and improvements throughout their desktop landscape.

KDE Plasma 5.18 About To Release While Plasma 5.19 Well Under Way
KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS is planned for release on Tuesday, 11 February, which means a mad rush of last minute fixes for this desktop as well as developers already working on Plasma 5.19 that is aiming for release in early June.

KDE Developers Fixed Many Bugs This Week
Not only have GNOME developers been fixing many bugs this week ahead of the 3.36 stable desktop release next week, but coincidentally KDE developers were also going heavy on the bug fixes this week.

Kaidan 0.5 Released As The KDE-Focused Jabber/XMPP Chat Client
Kaidan is the open-source project that last year joined KDE as a Jabber/XMPP chat client. After a half year of work, Kaidan 0.5 has finally been released.

Ubuntu Studio Making Good Progress On Their Transition To KDE Plasma
Ubuntu Studio, the spin of Ubuntu focused on multimedia production, announced last month that for their 20.10 release due out later this year they would be transitioning from their long-standing Xfce desktop environment over to using KDE Plasma. While still in early form, the transition is going ahead quite well.

Some Of The Features That Could Come To KDE In 2020
KDE developer Nate Graham who is well known for his weekly development summaries in the KDE space has shared his opinions on the desktop's features he expects to see materialize this year as well as some of the less likely bits.

Kdenlive 20.04 Beta Released With Continuing To Improve The Open-Source Video Editor
Open-source video editors over the years have generally fallen well short of the stability and feature set offered by proprietary video editing solutions but in recent years at least there has been some measurable progress to the likes of Kdenlive and OpenShot. Out this weekend for testing is the Kdenlive 20.04 beta.