Discover will have several modifications in Plasma 5.17, including three new ones that were unveiled today

It is Sunday noon, which means that KDE has returned to publish a blog post about KDE Usability & Productivity, an initiative they say is coming to an end. For those who have never heard of it, it is a meeting point for developers, designers and users where ideas come together to see what and how they could improve KDE software. Among what could be improved we have a Discover that Plasma 5.17 will introduce quite a few changes.

Among the changes that will come to the future Discover and that you mentioned in recent weeks we will have to there will be icons. The current Discover shows only text, which forces us to read if we want to get into the correct section. The Plasma "Software Center" of the future will make things easier for us in that regard and add icons next to the text. The changes mentioned this week are less flashy, but they will also be useful.

Upcoming new features

• The Do Not Disturb mode of notifications can now optionally be activated automatically when the screen is mirroring, such as when making a presentation (Plasma 5.17).
• The list of recent documents in the Kickoff application launcher and other launchers now include articles that are displayed in the GNOME Nautilus and the GTK (Plasma 5.17) file dialogs.

Performance fixes and improvements

• Fixed several bugs when right-clicking on the icons in the system tray: the wrong app no ​​longer highlights in certain circumstances and the icon that we have right-clicked no longer stays in focus (Plasma 5.17).
• The Plasma Networks widget no longer freezes when its individual settings window is resized to Wayland (Plasma 5.17).
• Split buttons that can open a dropdown no longer show visual glitches on their right sides. This is such a small design flaw that I didn't even realize it, but you can see how Spectacle's "Save" button is not well finished on the right; the lines above and below are seen to stick out a bit. (Plasma 5.17).
• Various menus in certain KDE applications that did not respect your active color scheme now do (Plasma 5.17).
• When using Konsole 19.08 outside of Plasma, pressing and releasing the Alt key no longer keeps focus in the menu bar.
• After opening and closing the Dolphin 19.12 terminal panel, the main view retains keyboard focus.

Three small UI improvements in Discover

• Active and inactive tabs in Chrome and Chromium now appear visually different in the Breeze-GTK (Plasma 5.17) theme.
• It is now possible to set a maximum volume lower than 100% (Plasma 5.17).
• Changes in Discover (Plasma 5.17):
  • Now a better message is displayed when there is no internet connection.
  • When it is loading the applications when you start the program, it shows a busy indicator.
  • On the updates page, the number of versions is displayed in lighter text so that the view remains on the name of the apps.

• The context menu of the task manager has an icon for "Allow this program to be grouped" (Plasma 5.17).
• The tab bar on the lock screen page in system preferences now has a full frame for content below it (Plasma 5.17).

• Dr Konqi's "crash" report dialog no longer displays third-party applications when it is not possible to create useful output (Frameworks 5.62).
• Kate 19.12 asks us if we want to save or discard unsaved changes when closing its settings window that has unapplied changes.
• Konsole 19.12's background randomization feature ensures proper contrast for text.
• When closing Konsole 19.12 and having only one tab open and a program is still running, the dialog box that asks us if we are sure we want to close it no longer mentions multiple tabs.

And what will happen in the future?

The only thing we are almost sure of, since there could be last minute changes, is when everything explained in this article will arrive:

• plasma 5.17 will arrive on October 15th.
• KDE applications 19.12 It will arrive in the middle of December. 19.08/XNUMX was released this week and will be coming to Discover soon (KDE's Backports repository).
• KDE Framework 5.62 will be released on September 14.

Regarding the KDE Usability & Productivity initiative that is giving us so much joy, Nate Graham has not given many explanations. The only thing he mentions is that «everything good must have an ending to make room for new growth»And that the initiative has« bathed »the community. Basically, his words leave us with the impression that everything will remain the same, but changes will no longer be posted on a blog, but in their forums, where there will be suggestions, debates and votes. I trust the KDE community and, as said a few months ago it "stayed" on my PC.