KDE Applications 19.04 To Support eBook Thumbnails, Allow Ripping CDs To Opus

With the feature freeze for KDE Applications 19.04 happening next month in order to meet the planned 18 April release date, KDE developers are busy getting their new features ready and reviewed for this next round of application updates.

The newest feature that has made its way into KDE Applications 19.04 is finally allowing the ability to rip audio CDs to the Opus audio format with that support working its way into the KIO code as a new plugin. That Opus codec support honors a feature request that had been open since January 2013. This applications bundle also will now support thumbnails on eBook epub/fb2 files. Also on the thumbnail front is supporting some Windows XPS / Office files with thumbnail support.

Other recent improvements to KDE include a number of random bug fixes, better settings handling when using the evdev input driver, various other system settings improvements, dragging desktop icons now works with Qt 5.11 and newer, and a lot of other fixes and polishing.

More details as well as screenshots illustrating many of these KDE desktop improvements can be found via this blog post by KDE polisher Nate Graham.