I'm not particularly excited about repeating the header image for the second consecutive week, but it is the one that best defines what has happened during the last seven days in KDE. There are just over two months left until what they call the KDE 6 Mega-Release lands, and the new functions arrive in smaller numbers to give the spotlight to bug fixes and stability patches. There will always be bugs to fix, but they are getting rid of them.
Between bug elimination and elimination there is still time to make aesthetic touches and put some order. For example, the Telegram icon in Breeze has been updated, and every now and then we read something about a page in System Preferences that has grown or been modified. These are some of the things that appear in the News list This week.
KDE 6 interface improvements
- The “Advanced Power Settings” page in System Preferences has been converted to a subpage of the “Power Settings” page (Jakob Petsovits):
- Several improvements have been made to the way device batteries are displayed on the "Power" page of the Information Center: more device types are now correctly identified and their models are displayed so that you can more easily distinguish batteries from different devices of the same type (Shubham Arora).
- When we try to connect to a Wi-Fi network but enter the wrong password, we are now informed of this immediately instead of having to wait a while to find out why it didn't connect correctly (David Redondo).
- The Breeze-themed Telegram icon has been updated to better match Telegram's own branding (Onur Ankut):
- The Breeze cursor theme now includes more pre-built sizes, making your cursors look better at various scale factors and in more apps and toolkits that don't yet conform to the Wayland cursor-shape-v1 protocol (Jin Liu) .
- Ark's built-in viewer window now remembers the window size the next time you open it (Ilya Pominov).
- In Spectacle's rectangular region mode, we can now hold down the Shift key to view the magnifying glass while moving the box with the arrow keys (Noah Davis).
Error correction
- KWin no longer crashes when an application tells it to open a window with an invalid size (Xaver Hugl, link).
- Editing an application's .desktop file so that the file's Exec= value ends up containing an equal sign no longer causes the properties dialog to crash the next time it is used to edit the same file (Harald Sitter).
- Fixed a common random crash in Plasma (David Redondo).
- KMenuEdit can no longer be blocked by creating a new entry, deleting it immediately and clicking "Save" (Harald Sitter).
- In Plasma Wayland session, power on and session actions work again after KWin has crashed (David Edmundson).
- Fixed several visual issues related to missing pixels when using multiple displays with some of them having a fractional scaling factor (Yifan Zhu).
- When using Dolphin Details mode to view a folder tree, expanding a folder no longer sorts items incorrectly when the main view was sorted by size (Akseli Lahtinen).
- Changes to cursor size now take effect in Plasma immediately, without needing to restart plasmashell (Vlad Zahorodnii and others).
- Using the “Cut” command on files and folders in Dolphin visually desaturates them again (Jin Liu).
- GTK4 applications now use the window closing animation provided by KWin, instead of disappearing immediately (Vlad Zahorodnii).
- When using Elisa in mobile mode, the playlist sidebar may close again (Kevin Kofler).
- The Plasma-themed spinbox UI element now works correctly with a wider variety of third-party styles (Marco Martin).
In terms of number of bugs, this week a total of 175 have been corrected.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.11 will arrive in February, Frameworks 113 today and on February 28, 2024 Plasma 6, KDE Frameworks 6 and KDE Gear 24.02.0 will arrive.
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.