While Plasma 5.10 is currently scheduled to be released on late of May, its upcoming features were already revealed by KDE developer Kai Uwe.
Although the next version of Plasma doesn’t seem to have any new “ground-breaking” features to introduce, which is quite understandable as the 5th series of KDE is now a mature desktop environment, it is nonetheless a highly welcomed release. Especially if you’re a long time user of the D.E..
So what new stuff are about to land then?
Notable New Features in Plasma 5.10
Pause before sleep – PowerDevil, KDE’s Power manager gained a feature that will enable it to pause media players before sending your computer to sleep.
Lock-screen media controls – this feature was an anticipated one, the fact that you locked the screen doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to change the song you’re currently listening to (or should you?).
Interactive notification previews – when you take a screenshot for instance, you’ll see a notification displaying a small preview of the screenshot you just took, now you could also manipulate that file through the notification by right clicking it and copy, open or send it via email.
Dolphin improvements:
- middle clicking a tab in dolphin will close it only upon releasing the button, instead of immediately.
- Floppies will be shown as “Floppy Disk” instead of “0B Removable Storage”.
- Added jump-list to file manager entries in Task Manager for quicker access to your files.
Folder View is back by default – users of KDE 4 probably remember that glassy window that was placed by default on the desktop, displaying your desktop folder commonly, that seem to be there for no reason.
Folder View in KDE Plasma 4
Well, apparently there’s a good enough reason for why it’s been there in the first place, and also, why it’s coming back. You may read about it extensively here. The short version, for the impatient, is that some users prefer having files on their desktop and Folder View is a good way to handle those.
Update: this feature was reported lately – virtual keyboard on lock screen – integration of virtual keyboard and the lock screen was added and will work on both Xorg and Wayland.
Plasma 5.10: virtual keyboard integrated into the lock screen
Other than those, there are more, less noticeable, improvements and of course you can expect the usual bugfixes as well. Hopefully, the bug that annoys you most will be crushed in this round.
