KDE Plasma 5.26 Will Start Faster, Many Other KDE Improvements Abound

Even with the summer heat, KDE developers remain very busy working towards Plasma 5.26 later this year as well as the next rounds of KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE application updates.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his latest weekly report outlining all of the fixes and improvements made to this open-source desktop/application stack. Some of the highlights of KDE changes for the past week include:

- Non-EXIF metadata stored within PNG images is now extracted and displayed within the properties dialog, starting with KDE Frameworks 5.97.

- In the properties dialog when a file has GPS coordinates as part of the metadata, it's now displayed as a clickable link.

- The highlight effect is now larger for hovered windows within the Present Windows and Desktop Grid effects.

- Various KDE Discover UI/UX enhancements, particularly around reviews handling.

- Improvements around sandboxed apps recording the screen via better behavior of its system tray icon and the screen chooser dialog areas.

- Visual transitions in the Pager widget are now animated for Plasma 5.26.

- KDE Plasma Wayland has addressed a fix for a way that KWin could be crashed when pressing a physical button on a connected drawing tablet.

- Plasma 5.26 will now load faster thanks to start-up time optimizations in the code.

- Many other random bug fixes and enhancements.

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