With the next version around the corner, it's time to focus on Plasma 5.18

Like every week, although now no longer in KDE Usability & Productivity, Nate Graham has published a new entry on his blog in which he talks about news that will come to the KDE world. Not this time posted as much new as in other weeks, but he did mention that right now they are focusing on polishing plasma 5.17, the version of the KDE graphical environment that will be officially released on October 15th.

What they are also telling us this week is that they are looking to the future to prepare for the release of Plasma 5.18. We are about five months away from the launch of what will be the next LTS version from Plasma and, although they have already started talking about their news, it is true that they have not yet talked about anything exciting. Below you have what they have published today in an entry that they have titled as «Towards Plasma 5.18».

Upcoming new features in Plasma 5.18 and Frameworks 5.63

• The General Behavior page of System Settings now has a global animation speed slider that controls the speed of all animations and allows us to disable them entirely (Plasma 5.18).
• KSysGuard now displays statistics for NVIDIA Graphics (Plasma 5.18) hardware.
• The system preferences now have a "Start" button that will take us to the main screen that shows the pages we have used frequently (Plasma 5.18).
• Kate, KDevelop, and other apps that use the KSyntaxHighlighting framework now offer syntax highlighting for Perl 6 (Frameworks 5.63) scripts.
• Kate 19.12 allows us to create new buttons on the bar that execute custom actions using the new External Tools plugin.
• Okular 1.9.0 allows us to right click on the selected text and find matches in the same text.

Performance and interface fixes and improvements

• Discover has stopped crashing at startup in KDE neon. This bug can be corrected by updating manually with pkcon refresh && pkcon update.
• The button to switch users on the lock screen is no longer partially cut off on 1366X768 (Plasma 5.17) screens.
• Corner notification pop-ups now sit equidistant from both adjacent edges of the screen (Plasma 5.17.0).
• Fixed a common KInit crash that could occur when closing Dolphin while viewing the contents of an Audio CD (Frameworks 5.63).
• When the systray popup is open, overlapping notifications are delayed and hidden until closed (Plasma 5.17.0).
• The Kickoff launcher settings window no longer shows a vertical scroll bar by default and looks better overall (Plasma 5.17.0).
• When hovering over a cursor preview in System Settings, the cursor now changes its appearance to match what's underneath so you can see what it looks like and preview its animated effect, if any (Plasma 5.18.0 ).
• It is now possible to select and delete multiple Bluetooth devices at the same time (Plasma 5.18.0).
• All desktop settings window sidebar icons are now colorful (Plasma 5.18.0).

Plasma 5.18 is coming in February

As we have already mentioned, Plasma 5.17, already in beta, will be released on October 15, but it is not known the exact day in February that the next LTS version (5.18) will do so. What is known is that Frameworks 5.63 will be released on October 12, but the arrival of these books to Discover will occur days or weeks later. Plasma updates are marked "same day."

What is not yet known, or at least I do not see it myself searching the internet or the KDE official page, is the exact day of the launch of KDE Applications 19.12. But, considering that it will be released in December, which will be in the middle of the month and that they are usually released on Tuesday, we can think that they will arrive on December 17. If we remember that those of v19.08.1 are already available and have not yet appeared in Discover, be patient.

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Plasma 5.18 will improve the Plasma system tray