The development looks promising as KDE Plasma 5.20 adds more super cool features such as warning about your hard disk or SSD failure, etc as the team prepares for the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.20 release.
Update: OCT 13, 2020: KDE Plasma 5.20 Officially Released. Read the complete coverage here.
Being in development for a while, the KDE Plasma 5.20 is already becoming a massive release which is due October 2020. I have listed the major features already in earlier articles.
For example, a new taskbar (Windows 7 look-a-like) is shaping up in Plasma 5.20, while a long-awaited Wayland fixes are also looking promising.
This week, as the development progresses, the KDE blog highlighted some more stunning features as well.
KDE Plasma 5.20 – Features Added
The major feature addition of this week is the addition of warning of a disk failure. The Plasma Desktop will now warn you for hard disk or SSD failure (S.M.A.R.T. capable devices) so that you can take timely backup. Not only this, the Kinfocenter shows the health of your hard disk or SSD device. This is a super productive feature and about to be useful for many many users.
On the appearance side, the GTK header bar apps now use the same appearance of your window title bar buttons while using the Breeze GTK theme.
Those were worried that the whole “KDE Plasma will now remember the last closed window position” thing – will have an option to turn it off.
Along with these new features, a handful of bug fixes and performance improvements also added to KDE Plasma 5.20 development branch.
Some of the important bug fixes that just added are – partition manager no longer fails to created single ext4 format on an unformatted SD card, Arck uses less memory while extracting files, System Settings Shortcuts page now permits keyboard navigation.
The Discover’s addons and remove package dialogs see visual and usability updates for better clarity.
In the Dolphin file manager’s table view – the SORT arrows will have now expected behavior. It will be down when the biggest items are on top and vice versa.
Overall KDE Plasma 5.20 is becoming a massive release looking at the feature sets and improvements. KDE Plasma 5.20 is due for release on October 2020 and will be available with Linux distributions – Ubuntu 20.10, Fedora 33 when released.
