KDE ⚙️ Gear 24.12

Dolphin

Manage your files

The latest changes to KDE's file explorer/manager tend heavily towards accessibility^* and usability.

For starters, the main view of Dolphin was completely overhauled to make it work with screen readers, and improved the keyboard navigation: pressing Ctrl+L multiple times will switch back and forth between focusing and selecting the location bar path and focusing the view. Pressing Escape in the location bar will now move the focus to the active view. The keyboard navigation in the toolbar has also been improved, as now the elements are focused in the right order.

Dolphin's sorting of files is more natural and "human" in this version: a file called "a.txt", for example, will appear before "a 2.txt", and you can also sort your videos by duration.

When it comes to your safety and checking your files, Dolphin has overhauled the checksum and permissions tab in the Properties dialog to make it easier for you. You will see this improvement in other KDE applications too.

Finally… Dolphin goes mobile! Dolphin now includes a mobile-optimized interface for Plasma Mobile. After the addition of a selection mode and improvements to touchscreen-compatibility, Dolphin works surprisingly well on phones! That said, more work is still needed and planned over time to more closely align the user interface with typical expectations for mobile apps.

^* Many of the accessibility improvements made to Dolphin 24.12 were possible thanks to funding provided by the NGI0 Entrust Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet program.

KCron

Task Scheduler

A less well-known utility, but also very useful, is KCron. UNIX old-timers will recognize this as a frontend for the venerable cron command of yore. For the rest of you, it lets you schedule any kind of jobs to run at any time on your machine.

Once installed, you will find it in System Settings under Session > Task Scheduler. In the new version, KCron's configuration page was ported to QML and given a fancy new look.

KDE Connect

Seamless connection of your devices

KDE Connect is our popular app for connecting your desktop with your phone and, indeed, all your other devices. It allows you to share files, clipboards, and resources, as well as providing a remote control for media players, input devices, and presentations.

Great news: Bluetooth support for KDE Connect now works! Plus KDE Connect starts up much faster on macOS, dropping from 3s to 100ms!

In the looks department, the list of devices you can connect to now shows the connected and remembered devices separately, and the list of plugins can be filtered and comes with icons.

KRDC

Connect with RDP or VNC to another computer

If you need to access a remote desktop from your computer, you can start KRDC by opening a .rdp file containing the RDP connection configuration. KRDC now works much better on Wayland too.

Tokodon

Browse the Fediverse

Tokodon is your gateway into the Fediverse.

Developers of KDE's desktop and phone app have worked hard to improve your experience when accessing Mastodon for the first time. We have redesigned the welcome page, and, more importantly, Tokodon now fetches a list of public servers to simplify the registration process.

We have also focused on safety, so now you can forcibly remove users from your followers list. A safety page has been added to the Tokodon settings to manage the list of muted and blocked users.

So you can travel further through the Fediverse, Tokodon has improved the support for alternative server implementations, such as GoToSocial, Iceshrimp.NET, and Pixelfed. Tokodon has also added "News" and "Users" tabs to the Explore page.

We also added a new "Following" feed, to quickly page through your follows and their feeds. It's now easier to start private conversations or mention users right from their profile page.

Tokodon now supports quoting posts, and when you are writing a post, your user info is on display, which is useful if you post from multiple accounts. Right clicking on a link on a post will show a context menu allowing users to copy or share the URL directly.

Finally, a proper grid view for the media tab has been added in the profile page.

NeoChat

Chat on Matrix

NeoChat gives you a convenient way to interact with users on the Matrix chat network.

As your trust and safety are important when talking with strangers, you now have the option to block images and videos by default, and we implemented a Matrix Spec that redirects searches for harmful and potentially illegal content to a support message.

Besides that, when replying to users you ignored, your message will not be shown, avoiding accidentally interacting with disagreeable people. We have also improved the Security settings page to be more relevant and useful to normal users.

NeoChat's looks and usability have also improved and include a nicer emoji picker, more room list sorting options, a more complete message context menu, and better-looking polls.