KDE Gear 21.08

The KDE project has announced the release of KDE Gear 21.08, which updates the over 200 apps that are part of the project. The announcement highlights updates in many of the desktop tools that KDE Plasma users are accustomed to, including the Okular document viewer, the Dolphin file manager, Elisa music player, and Gwenview image viewer. The Konsole terminal application got updated as well:

Text terminals are intimidating to people who are new to Linux. But knowing just a bit about how to use them (no, you don't need to know how to program) gives you a level of control over your machine difficult to achieve any other way.

This is doubly true when using Konsole, KDE's very powerful spin on the classic text terminal. In fact, calling Konsole a terminal emulator" and leaving it at that is not fair. Take Konsole's preview feature, for example, type white, red, blue or salmon at the command line, hover the cursor over the word, and a box will appear displaying the color. You can also use HTML color codes, like #1d99f3 and get a preview of the KDE blue color.

Previews extend to images and folders: hover the cursor over an image filename in a list in Konsole and a thumbnail will pop up showing you a preview. Hovering over a folder will show you a preview of its contents. This is very useful when you want to make sure you are copying, moving, or erasing the right thing.