Today, KDE has rolled out the latest version of its app collection, KDE Gear 24.12.1, as the first update to the 24.12 series.
While the most noticeable improvements involve bug fixes and updated translations, the release includes numerous behind-the-scenes enhancements to optimize performance and stability.
For instance, Kasts, KDE’s podcast manager, now retrieves the duration of audio files as soon as they are downloaded. Additionally, Konversation has mitigated a crash scenario triggered by updating “Watched Nicks.” Telly Skout, a TV guide app, now boasts faster program description updates.
Moreover, Dolphin and Elisa have received modifications to improve file handling, thumbnail generation, and crash prevention. Okular, KDE’s versatile document viewer, also benefits from a round of targeted improvements in this release. Most visibly, it fixes scrolling behavior in single-page, non-continuous mode, ensuring smoother navigation.
The comprehensive changelog indicates that even seemingly small fixes—like adjusting focus when unminimizing Dolphin on X11 or refining how media playlist proxies handle row mapping—can significantly impact productivity and reliability.
Furthermore, Itinerary Travel Assistant and Kdenlive video editor each boast multiple refinements that reduce the likelihood of application crashes, enhance UI responsiveness, and shore up data integrity.
For more information, see the release notes. KDE Gear 24.12.1 apps collection tarballs can be downloaded from the source info page, as the full changelog provides a deeper dive into the update.
Lastly, most KDE Gear 24.12.1 apps will soon be available on Flathub and Snap Store. Rolling release distributions can expect the app collection in their respective distros’ repositories in the coming days and weeks.
I've been a huge fan of KDE for a long time now and am always happily amazed at its continued rapid improvement. Plasma 5 was pretty great, and 6 has become even better very quickly. Can't wait to see what this latest round of updates to the most user-facing elements looks like.
For me, Plasma 6 is already near perfect – the only things missing are some of the user-supplied widgets from 5, specifically the weather-widget. On Arch it's in the aur, but so far it's still not available through the "Get New… Download…" button or on kde-look. I've managed to get it working by manually adding the .plasmoid file (Install from local file) on most distros…