KDE had this December 12th marked in red for the arrival of a new major update of its set of applications. After a mismatch caused by the sixes, the project that K loves so much has announced the launch of KDE Gear 24.12, and it has arrived, as we explained, at its usual time. There are usually major releases in April, August and December, while in the rest of the months they give us point updates to correct errors. The mismatch of the sixes made the numbers dance a bit, but they got back on track. last August.
KDE Gear 24.12 introduces new features that come four months after the previous additions. The project has facilitated a link in which we find the complete list of changes, and another, the release notes, in which they extend a little in the most outstanding news. They are the following.
KDE Gear 24.12 Highlights
In this update, Okular has received support for more types of items in dropdowns, also known as comboboxes, in PDF forms, and improved speed and accuracy when printing. In addition, it is now easier to digitally sign documents and the signature window is no longer hidden prematurely; it now does so when the signing process is complete.
The notes editor or notepad and the signature encryption dialog of Cleopatra have been redesigned, and now the messages and errors are clearer. This has meant that in Merkuro, when opening OpenPGP or S/MIME certificates from a contact, they are now displayed directly in Merkuro Contact.
Improvements in the multimedia section
Kdenlive is KDE's mega-popular video editor, a favorite for many on both Linux and other operating systems. In KDE Gear 24.12, the editor allows you to resize multiple items at once on the timeline. Continuing with multimedia editing, kwave has switched to using Qt6, which makes it perform better in Plasma 6. In addition, the application has been visually improved.
Dolphin, the file manager, has seen its main view improved to work with screen readers, and navigation has been improved: by pressing Ctrl + L will repeatedly cycle back and forth between focus mode and selecting the location bar and view. Pressing I in the location bar, will now move to the focus mode in the active view. Also, Dolphin’s file sorting is more natural and human-like in this version: for example, a file named “a.txt” will appear before “a 2.txt,” and it’s also possible to sort videos by length.
No less important is that Dolphin now includes an interface optimized for mobile devices, as well as Touchscreen support has been improved.
KDE Connect is the application with which we can connect our mobile devices with Plasma. In KDE Gear 24.12, Bluetooth support works. In addition, it starts much faster on macOS, going down from the previous 3s to the current 0.1s. In the visual section, the list of connected devices now shows the connected and remembered ones separately.
other developments
- Kate has received improvements to the user experience.
- Francis, the app that helps you plan your work sessions and avoid fatigue, lets you skip the current work phase or break time in its new version.
- Konqueror, our venerable file explorer/web browser, comes with improved auto-completion of login information.
- The Elisa music player allows you to load song lyrics from .lrc files that are located alongside the song files.
- Falkon includes a context menu for Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey allows you to run small scripts that modify the content of web pages on the fly.
- Alligator RSS feed reader offers bookmarks for your favorite posts.
- Telly Skout, one of the latest TV scheduling apps, comes with a redesigned screen that displays your favorite TV channels and the shows that are currently airing.
KDEConnect 24.12 has been announced todayNew packages will be coming soon to KDE neon, the earliest Rolling Release distributions, and later to the rest, depending on the philosophy of each one.