KDE Gear 26.08 shipped on August 20, the latest quarterly release of KDE’s application suite. The headline items are in Okular, Dolphin, and Kdenlive.

Dolphin

The best change is small and long overdue: sorting and grouping are now independent. You can order files by name while grouping them by type, which was previously impossible because grouping followed whatever you sorted by.

Dolphin also gains filtering with regular expressions, which turns the filter bar from a convenience into a real tool for anyone who works in directories with hundreds of files.

KDE Connect integration improved as well. When browsing files on a connected phone, a new button at the top of the window launches KDE Connect directly.

Okular

The two separate configuration dialogs, “Configure Backends” and “Configure Okular,” have been merged into a single settings interface.

If you have ever gone looking for a setting in Okular and found the wrong dialog, you know why this matters. Splitting configuration across two entry points with no obvious rule about which held what was a genuine usability problem, and consolidating them is the right fix.

Signing features also improved, and text handling picked up two nice touches: triple-clicking selects an entire line, and highlighting or underlining text automatically adds that text to the annotation note.

That last one is a real workflow improvement for anyone annotating papers. Previously the annotation recorded that you highlighted something but not what, so reviewing your own notes meant jumping back to each location.

Kdenlive

The Transform effect now lets you move the rotation axis rather than forcing rotation around the center. Kdenlive also adds visual alignment guides and nested sequences to the timeline.

Nested sequences are the significant one for longer projects. Being able to treat a finished section as a single clip in a parent timeline is how you keep a complex edit manageable, and it is a feature that separates hobby editors from ones people use for real work.

Getting it

# Arch
sudo pacman -Syu

# Fedora
sudo dnf upgrade --refresh

# Flatpak, per app
flatpak update org.kde.dolphin org.kde.okular org.kde.kdenlive

KDE Gear is separate from Plasma and Frameworks, so this arrives independently of the Plasma 6.8 work landing in October.