As a person who has never had problems with eyesight, what elementary OS proposed in the latest version of its operating system and now also prepares KDE It is something that I simply had not taken into account and now I have learned. We don't all see the same. In addition to seeing more or less clearly, there are also people who see colors differently, among whom I think we all know the color blind. But there are more problems of this type, and accessibility must be improved so that these people can work in the best possible way.
In February the big jump to 6 will arrive. There are many things that are going to change, and a time like this is unbeatable for adding drastic changes. This thing about colors is not a huge and general change, but it is an important improvement and the timing fits. What you have below is a list with news highlights that have arrived this week in KDE.
News that will arrive with Plasma 6
- KWin now includes an effect that can change the colors of the entire screen to help people with various forms of color blindness. (Fushan Wen):
- The key F10 is now used in most KDE applications (and more will be ported soon) to open the main menu or hamburger menu. This means that the keyboard shortcut for creating a new file had to be changed to Ctrl+Shift+N, which also makes it more consistent with what is used in other environments (Felix Ernst).
- Kate, KWrite, and other KTextEditor-based applications have received support for speaking text from the document (Christoph Cullmann).
- In all QtQuick-based KDE software, mouse wheel scrolling now animates the view smoothly. Note that this is different from inertial scrolling for touchpads, which is not yet implemented. (HeCheng Yu and Fushan Wen).
- When Panel has a Task Manager widget, the feature of adding panel launchers (as opposed to pinned Task Manager apps) has been hidden to avoid confusion (Niccolò Venerandi).
- LibreOffice documents now appear in the “Recent Documents” list in Plasma (Méven Car).
- Cursor theme previews are no longer drawn too small when using scaling in Wayland, and are no longer pixelated when using a fractional scaling factor (Fushan Wen).
- Packages downloaded locally and manually installed using Discover can now be updated and uninstalled (Alessandro Astone).
- Offline updates in Discover now report your progress more accurately (Alessandro Astone, link)
- In Plasma Wayland session, it is now possible to mirror (i.e. visually flip) a screen if necessary (Xaver Hugl).
Other UI improvements
- The default location where Spectacle saves screenshots and recordings has been changed; now they are saved in
~/Pictures/Screenshotsy~/Videos/Screencasts, respectively. And of course, these default settings can be changed if you prefer them to be saved elsewhere. (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.02). - Elisa's color scheme selector menu now looks native, not a bit weird (Jack Hill, Elisa 24.02).
Bug fixes of some importance for KDE
- Fast user switching from a passwordless user account now works (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.9).
- In Dolphin, the “Create New” menu now toggles correctly when switching tabs (Amol Godbole, Dolphin 24.02).
This list is a summary of the fixed bugs. The complete lists of bugs are on the pages of 15 minute bug, very high priority bugs and overall list. This week a total of 89 bugs.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.9 It will arrive next Tuesday and Frameworks 111 will arrive throughout the day today. There is still no confirmed date for the rest, but there is already a proposal: Plasma 28, KDE Frameworks 2024 and KDE Gear 6 would arrive on February 6, 24.02.0.
To enjoy all this as soon as possible we have to add the repository backports of KDE, use an operating system with special repositories like Kde neon or any distribution whose development model is Rolling Release.
Images and content: pointieststick.com.