The article about news of the week in KDE today includes what happened during the last 15 days, since nothing was published last week. So what we have is quite a bit to comment on, and several points arrive a little late because they tell us about bugs fixed in the plasma 5.27.9 which arrived last Tuesday. Logically, the number of patches to correct errors has also increased, practically doubling the usual number.
The KDE project continues to focus on Plasma 6, although it does not forget what we now have at hand. The big launch will take place in February, and we must continue adding new features and making them work as well as possible. Although the truth is that few will have to worry about the first arrival date, since most distributions will wait a little before adopting Plasma 6.0. What follows is the News list that have arrived since October 14 until a few hours ago.
News that will arrive in Plasma 6
- Per-screen color management is now supported in the Plasma Wayland session. You can assign ICC color profiles to each display and Wayland's native apps will do the right thing. And colors chosen with the Color Picker applet are now also managed properly. Exporting this to apps using XWayland is on the roadmap. This all depends on the Wayland protocol for color management being merged, which is more likely now that there is a KDE implementation (Xaver Hugl).
- The cube effect returns to the desktop. It is now located in the kdeplasma-addons repository and can be activated with the shortcut Meta+C (Vlad Zahorodnii):
- When running Spectacle in Plasma 6, you can now take “Active Window” and “Window Under Cursor” screenshots that optionally omit window shadows (Kristen McWilliam):
- Discover has started to see many small improvements to the user interface (Marco Martin, Arjen Hiemstra, Jonah Brüchert and Nate Graham):
- a prettier background color for card views; Better visual alignment of cards on search and explore pages.
- Smarter sidebar behavior during search.
- a more robust display of screenshots of apps and backends without properly specified thumbnails.
- Flatpak applications with low-level access to PipeWire are now correctly marked as having access to the audio system.
- Flatpak app sizes are now more concise and readable.
- As for Discover, its app details page has received a new rewritten screenshot viewer, which is much better than the old one in every way and fixes multiple bugs (Ivan Tkachenko):
- The Overview effect now has an option to perform only a KRunner-powered search when searching, instead of also filtering windows based on search text (Dashon Wells, link).
- When you have configured fingerprint or smart card authentication, you can now use that method on the lock screen, OR the password, instead of only being able to use the password after failing the other authentication method multiple times . This is only for the lock screen at the moment and not also the Polkit authentication dialog, but that is being explored as well (Janet Blackquill).
- Headers of configuration dialogs in QtWidgets-based applications now have the same style as System Preferences and other Kirigami-based applications (Waqar Ahmed):
- KFontView now works as expected in Wayland (Kai Use Broulik).
- The System Preferences shortcuts page has been revamped a bit to avoid the "chunky footer" style used in Plasma 5 (Mike Noe):
- The speed of KRunner's recent document manager has been more than doubled, among other improvements (Alexander Lohnau).
- The infinite scrolling calendar of the Digital Clock widget is now much more responsive (Fushan Wen).
- Keyboard search in Dolphin now causes the matching file to be centered in the window when using Details view (Amol Godbole).
- In Elisa, playlist items now play with a single click instead of a double click, and when trying to play a song that has been deleted or renamed, it warns appropriately (Nate Graham).
- The “Get new [thing]” dialog now has a proper minimum size (Oliver Beard).
Correction of minor bugs
- Fixed a case in the Plasma Wayland session where logging in KWin would immediately crash and return you to the login screen (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.9).
- Corrected the most common bug in Plasma that could appear when closing notifications, backporting a Qt patch that corrects it, since it is already corrected in Plasma 6 (Marco Martin and David Edmundson, the latest version of the KDE Qt 5 Patch Collection ).
- Fixed a semi-common crash in Discover when installing Flatpak applications (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27.9)
- Several global shortcuts provided by KWin that should always be enabled by default - such as for switching virtual desktops - now are (Joshua Goins, Plasma 5.27.9)
- Fixed a race condition that caused the “Show in Activities” menu item in the windows menu to only be visible in some cases (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27.9).
- Fixed annoying screen flickering when using touchpad gestures to switch virtual desktops with animations globally disabled (Quinten Kock, Plasma 5.27.9).
- Fixed the most common bug in System Monitor that could sometimes cause it to explode when exiting or changing pages (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.0)
- Fixed a case where file associations could be inherited in the wrong order, causing certain document types to open in the wrong applications under certain circumstances (David Redondo, Plasma 6.0).
- Fixed an issue that could cause complex display layouts with chained DisplayPort displays to be randomly arranged after activation, reboot, or hot plug (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, using a stylus to interact with the system settings tablet page no longer causes the rest of the system settings to become unresponsive to stylus input (Aki Sakurai, Plasma 6.0).
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 220 bugs.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.9 It arrived last Tuesday. During the last two weeks it was confirmed that Plasma 28, KDE Frameworks 2024 and KDE Gear 6 will 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.