As a user of KDE Whenever I can, I even use many of their apps on my Manjaro xfce-usb, the news about the project interests me especially. The last the posted Nate Graham a few minutes ago, and in it he talks about very interesting things. Some of them are aesthetic, but some of them are related to something they have been working on for many months. Specifically, the graphic server that they want to gain prominence in the future.
The first important thing he mentions is that Plasma Wayland sessions have improved a lot, which means that it works correctly and you hope that, as early as 2021, many more people will be able to use it in their workflows. Wayland was already one of KDE's goals in 2020, but Graham says it was all a "noise", that nothing was working as it should and 2020 was not his year. He does hope that it will be 2021, or at least that it begins to be.
KDE Kickoff will change to be neater, but not everyone will like it equally
The next thing Graham mentions in his article is that Kickoff will be replaced, or more specifically modified. You have the new image in this link, and personally I do not know if I am happy about this change. At present, the application launcher is showing icons as we move, and in the new one it will be more or less the same, but it seems that it shows more information. It's pretty much finished, and it's expected to arrive alongside Plasma 5.21 on February 16.
In the rest of the roadmap, these objectives are also mentioned:
- Fingerprint support. This may take time to come, since it must be integrated into SDDM, the lock screen, KAuth and Polkit, but hope that it will be a reality in 2021 in which we have only been 18 hours.
- Breeze theme will improve. Much will arrive alongside Plasma 5.21 in February and the rest will come in Plasma 5.22 or even 5.23. From what they explain, the applications will have a much more modern image and stylized.
- Window Konsole will reflow the text when we change its size.
For a user like me, who follows the KDE news from week to week, this may sound like little, but they are big points with huge changes that deserve special mention. During the weekends, Nate Graham himself tells us about other smaller changes that they prepare for their desktop and apps, as they did in their day with the Spectacle's annotation function that we can already use in systems like KDE neon or Manjaro.
In any case, it is the first thing the KDE project has told us in 2021, which also serves to congratulate us on the year and we will do the same: Happy 2021!