KDE Gear is a collection of software applications developed by the KDE community for the KDE Plasma desktop environment. These cover productivity, multimedia, graphics, communication, system management, and more.
Four months after the previous major release, 23.04, KDE Gear 23.08 is here, so let’s see what’s changed.
What’s New in KDE Gear 23.08
Dolphin, KDE’s file manager, which provides a clean and user-friendly interface for managing files and folders, has received some quality-of-life improvements. Now, it shows the progress of the calculation of the size of the folder on the fly.
In addition, until now, Dolphin displayed information about each item when the cursor hovered over it. This has now been changed by displaying the information in the information panel.
However, the most significant change in KDE Gear 23.08 is Merkuro. What? Have you never heard of it? It is normal because it is a brand new name that combines the previous Kalendar application with the capabilities of Address Book.
We renamed Kalendar to Merkuro since the application not only lets you manage your events and tasks any more, but also your contacts.
But that’s not all. The KDE developers plan to add e-mail capabilities to Merkuro, making the application a full-featured replacement for existing e-mail clients.
Okular, KDE’s document viewer, extends its digital PDF signing capabilities by allowing signees to include metadata such as “reason” and “location” in the signature.
KDE’s travel assistant, Itinerary, now supports importing online railway tickets with the booking reference and passenger name and retrieving booking details directly from the operator’s website.
The Skanpage scanning program now supports drag-and-drop re-ordering of multi-page scans and provides more adjustment options such as brightness, contrast, gamma, and color balance.
Tokodon, KDE’s Mastodon client, has had a visual makeover, and the timeline is significantly smoother.
We’ll wrap up our review of what’s new in KDE Gear 23.08 with three of its major applications.
The first of these, Kate, KDE’s text editor, continues to become a fully functional IDE. It has received support for the GLSL language and now includes a QML language server option when using Qt 6.
Next, KDE’s music player, Elisa, has significantly improved its ability to find covers and now offers a much smoother transition when switching from one album cover to another.
Finally, Gwenview, a fast and easy-to-use image viewer by KDE, also improved when transitioning between images, bringing at the same time some GUI enhancements.
A complete list of all changes in the KDE Gear 23.08 app collection can be found in the release announcement.
