KDE ⚙️ Gear 24.12

The latest changes to KDE's file explorer/manager tend heavily towards accessibility^* and usability.

Для начала был полностью переработан главный вид файлового менеджера Dolphin для совместимости с программами чтения с экрана и улучшена навигация с клавиатуры: многократное нажатие Ctrl+L переключает фокус между выделением пути в адресной строке и активным видом. Нажатие Escape в адресной строке теперь перемещает фокус в активный вид. Также улучшена навигация по панели инструментов — элементы получают фокус в правильном порядке.

Dolphin's sorting of files is more natural and "human" in this version: a file called "a.txt", for example, will appear before "a 2.txt", and you can also sort your videos by duration.

When it comes to your safety and checking your files, Dolphin has overhauled the checksum and permissions tab in the Properties dialog to make it easier for you. You will see this improvement in other KDE applications too.

Finally… Dolphin goes mobile! Dolphin now includes a mobile-optimized interface for Plasma Mobile. After the addition of a selection mode and improvements to touchscreen-compatibility, Dolphin works surprisingly well on phones! That said, more work is still needed and planned over time to more closely align the user interface with typical expectations for mobile apps.

^* Many of the accessibility improvements made to Dolphin 24.12 were possible thanks to funding provided by the NGI0 Entrust Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet program.

A less well-known utility, but also very useful, is KCron. UNIX old-timers will recognize this as a frontend for the venerable cron command of yore. For the rest of you, it lets you schedule any kind of jobs to run at any time on your machine.

Once installed, you will find it in System Settings under Session > Task Scheduler. In the new version, KCron's configuration page was ported to QML and given a fancy new look.

KDE Connect — популярное приложение для подключения компьютера к телефону и всем остальным устройствам. Позволяет обмениваться файлами, содержимым буфера обмена и ресурсами, а также управлять медиаплеерами, устройствами ввода и презентациями удалённо.

Great news: Bluetooth support for KDE Connect now works! Plus KDE Connect starts up much faster on macOS, dropping from 3s to 100ms!

In the looks department, the list of devices you can connect to now shows the connected and remembered devices separately, and the list of plugins can be filtered and comes with icons.

If you need to access a remote desktop from your computer, you can start KRDC by opening a .rdp file containing the RDP connection configuration. KRDC now works much better on Wayland too.

Tokodon is your gateway into the Fediverse.

Developers of KDE's desktop and phone app have worked hard to improve your experience when accessing Mastodon for the first time. We have redesigned the welcome page, and, more importantly, Tokodon now fetches a list of public servers to simplify the registration process.

We have also focused on safety, so now you can forcibly remove users from your followers list. A safety page has been added to the Tokodon settings to manage the list of muted and blocked users.

So you can travel further through the Fediverse, Tokodon has improved the support for alternative server implementations, such as GoToSocial, Iceshrimp.NET, and Pixelfed. Tokodon has also added "News" and "Users" tabs to the Explore page.

We also added a new "Following" feed, to quickly page through your follows and their feeds. It's now easier to start private conversations or mention users right from their profile page.

Tokodon now supports quoting posts, and when you are writing a post, your user info is on display, which is useful if you post from multiple accounts. Right clicking on a link on a post will show a context menu allowing users to copy or share the URL directly.

Finally, a proper grid view for the media tab has been added in the profile page.

NeoChat gives you a convenient way to interact with users on the Matrix chat network.

As your trust and safety are important when talking with strangers, you now have the option to block images and videos by default, and we implemented a Matrix Spec that redirects searches for harmful and potentially illegal content to a support message.

Besides that, when replying to users you ignored, your message will not be shown, avoiding accidentally interacting with disagreeable people. We have also improved the Security settings page to be more relevant and useful to normal users.

NeoChat's looks and usability have also improved and include a nicer emoji picker, more room list sorting options, a more complete message context menu, and better-looking polls.