The KDE Project released today KDE Gear 25.04 as the latest version of this collection of apps for the KDE Plasma desktop environment and the Linux ecosystem, adding new features and enhancements to your favorite KDE applications.
KDE Gear 25.04 brings improved integration with the Orca screen reader to the Dolphin file manager, which also received support for navigating files with the arrow keys and selecting them using Enter to boost productivity, a new icon that features an actual dolphin, the ability to rename tabs, a more compact status bar, a tidier layout, and initial support for right-to-left (RTL) languages.
The Konqueror file/web browser has been updated in this release with an improved Save As dialog that now remembers where a file was last downloaded, displaying that location the next time the user picks the option, KDE Connect received improvements to the speed of transferring data when using Bluetooth, and Kongress congress and summit assistant app now shows the name of the speaker for each talk.
KRDC remote desktop client received support for the domain field in the authentication process, support for the latest version of the FreeRDP protocol, and the ability to scale down the remote machine’s desktop to fit inside KRDC’s window.
KDE’s travel assistant app Itineraty received many new features including support for Bilkom and PKP PDF tickets, International Trenitalia ticket barcodes, Danish language support for Booking.com, ticket emails for Universe (e.g. Lollapalooza), and many east European travel companies, especially from Poland, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic, and a new My Data page to track your program memberships, health certificates, saved locations, and travel statistics.
KDE Gear 25.04 also improves the Merkuro calendar app to make the region settings for holidays configurable, allowing you to select more than one region, the ability to show holidays in the Week and Month views, support for filtering tasks to only display the ones due today, and support for multiple selections and applying actions to all selected contacts in the contact list.
KDE’s KMail email client now lets you check the validity of an unknown OpenPGP certificate, KOrganizer calendar and scheduling component of Kontact got a new date picker for faster navigation to a selected date, Okular document viewer received support for PGP/GPG-based signatures, and Keysmith 2FA generator app now supports importing tokens from QR codes and the andOTP app.
Among other changes, the KWave audio editor received improvements to playback performance, the Kdenlive video editor received support for importing and exporting projects using the OpenTimelineIO format and a completely revamped audio waveform viewer, and the NeoChat chat client received a “Copy Link Address” context menu item and support for sorting rooms in the sidebar based on their most recent activity.
On top of that, the Elisa music player now automatically plays files opened from a different app, the Kasts podcast client now lets users choose between mobile or desktop mode, and the AudioTube YouTube client now lets you view synchronized lyrics provided by LRCLIB.
Also, the KDevelop IDE now supports the Language Server Protocol (LSP), and the Kate text editor now supports the debputy language server, the Tokodon client for Mastodon now lets you save drafts of toots and schedule them to be sent later, and the Falkon web browser now blocks websockets.
KDE Gear 25.04 also comes with many other smaller changes and bug fixes, so check out the full changelog for all the technical details. Meanwhile, keep an eye on the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution for the KDE Gear 25.04 packages and update your installations as soon as possible, especially if you’re using the KDE Plasma desktop environment.
Last updated on April 17th, 2025 at 01:56 am
