KDE Ends 2021 With More Plasma Wayland Fixes, Root File Operations For Dolphin

KDE developers ended out 2021 with more Wayland session fixes coming for the Plasma 5.24 release. There was also nice user feature work like KIO-using applications such as Dolphin now properly dealing with non-user-owned locations.

KDE developer Nate Graham this morning published his usual weekly development summary of all the interesting changes going on in the KDE space. Some of the KDE changes for the final week of 2021 included:

- The Dolphin file manager can now be launched as root or other non-user-owned locations. This is thanks to PolKit support being merged in KIO. KDE applications making use of KIO can now create/move/copy/trash/delete files in non-user-owned locations as of KDE Frameworks 5.90.

- KRunner has an inline help feature that can be initiated when starting by typing a "?" or clicking on the new question mark icon.

- KWin with the Plasma Wayland session now supports greater than 8-bit color.

- Gwenview no longer crashes in some cases when opening JPEG files.

- Advanced keyboard options now work properly again under Plasma Wayland.

- The Plasma Wayland session will no longer crash if using the Display & Monitor settings page and letting the revert timer get down to zero seconds.

- Restoring a minimized or maximized window under Plasma Wayland will now have the same behavior as on Plasma X11 sessions.

- Konsole now allows opening the current directory or any other folder when you right-click on it within any app, rather than just being limited to opening in the file manager previously.

- Plasma will now consume less CPU resources or hang for applications that frequently update their window titles.

- Discover now has an option to automatically reboot after an update is complete.

More details on this week's KDE activities via Nate's blog.