KDE Plasma 5.22 Will Better Warn You If Your Disk Might Be Failing

One year into the pandemic the KDE developers remain as busy as ever advancing their free software desktop solution.

It was another busy week improving KDE by all the developers involved both with fixes to KDE Plasma 5.21 and related applications as well as looking ahead with feature work to Plasma 5.22 and the next round of app releases.

KDE developer Nate Graham has once again put out his nicely summarized overview of KDE changes that landed for the week. In going through those changes, some of this week's KDE highlights include:

- Notifications to the user when disks are detected that are not a full SMART failure but could lead to data loss soon. This Plasma 5.22 change stems from a user noticing GNOME Disks reporting disk damage but KDE did not. Basically, KDE will now report SMART failure codes to the user even if it doesn't result in a bad SMART status.

- The Elisa music player has a mobile interface to support Plasma Mobile and Android. Elisa also picked up support for playing AAC files.

- Improvements to the Plasma System Monitor application replacing KSysGuard in Plasma 5.22. Similarly this week brought fix so Plasma System Monitor hopefully won't crash on Wayland.

- The "Force Font DPI" setting in Plasma should now work again on Wayland.

- Kate supports jumping back to the previous cursor position.

More details on this week's changes via Nate's blog.