This week in KDE: Plasma 5.18 in two days

You only need to wait two more days for Plasma 5.18! We’re working overtime to get it in great shape for the release and already looking forward towards 5.19, which promises to be another very exciting release. Have a look-see:

New Features

• The Samba status page in Info Center has been completely rewritten and now actually works (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The System Settings Default Applications page has been completely rewritten to have a radically better and more comprehensible user interface (Méven Car, Plasma 5.19.0): And yes, we’re aware that these comboboxes should all have the same width
• Info Center now shows information about your graphics hardware (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.19.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Elisa no longer lets you set up a radio station source with an invalid URL (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 20.04.0)
• The System Settings Fonts page now enables its “Apply” button at the correct times, so it’s usable again (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.18.0)
• GTK apps now automatically use the Breeze-GTK theme by default unless the distro overrides it (Mikhail Zolotukhin, Plasma 5.18.0)
• App windows now resize much faster and more smoothly (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.18.0):
  https://i.imgur.com/hSu5tHr.mp4
• The System Settings Removable Devices page no longer shows Snap app mount points (Méven Car, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The System Tray popup no longer sometimes shows blank items (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.18.0)
• When dragging a file to the bottom-right corner of the desktop, the context menu that appears is now positioned correctly (Tranter Madi, Plasma 5.19.0)
• The correct drag cursor is now used when performing drag-and-drop operations on Wayland (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.19.0)
• Fixed a severe memory leak in apps (like Dolphin) that use the KUrlNavigator component , which could potentially result in gigabytes of wasted memory (Fabian Vogt, Frameworks 5.68)
• Canceling a file transfer operation now results in the operation actually stopping immediately , with no residual clean-up processes being left behind that can cause errors later (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.68)

User Interface Improvements

• Improved the margins and fonts of Elisa’s grid and list view items (Alexander Stippich, Elisa 20.04.0)
• The first time System Settings is opened, its main window no longer jarringly resizes itself to be larger after half a second; instead it just opens at the correct size (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Discover no longer percent-encodes any HTML-unsafe characters in search terms; instead it just removes any HTML tags that were accidentally included in the search (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.1):
  
• The fancy new “Get New [stuff]” window that you’ll see throughout Plasma 5.18 no longer has an ugly white bar at the bottom , now has a more sensible default size , and its close button always has text (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.67):
  
• Improved some commonly confusing terms in various KDE apps: “Redisplay” is now “Refresh” and “AutoSkip” is now “Skip All” (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.68)

How You Can Help

Upgrade to Plasma 5.18 and find all the bugs we missed! The first point release (i.e. Plasma 5.18.1) will be released a week after launch day, so every bug report we get during that week is super important.

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out more ways to help be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation .