I am a happy user of KDE, but there are some things they can still improve on. Otherwise they would not always be thinking about what to tweak and adding changes. In my opinion, where you can improve something is in the design, since it is too simple and one looks askance at GNOME 40 and some gestures that, although it is true that they are not part of the image, you can control the speed of the animation.
What is part of the GNOME design is how the windows are displayed, and in this sense some disorder is more aesthetic than order. For that reason, the KDE project is working on a new version of «Present Windows», the one you have on the right in the header capture. Nate graham mentions which looks like the one on macOS, and that's good. One does not stop thinking that in the future we will be able to access it with the touch panel, but for that they have to make the leap to Wayland. This novelty will arrive in Plasma 5.23.
As new functions, this week only the previous one has advanced and another that will allow us to choose the status of the Bluetooth adapter when starting the session: on, off or remembering the state it was in the last time the system was restarted (Nate Graham , Plasma 5.23).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- Spectacle takes screenshots again at the correct resolution in a Plasma Wayland session using a fractional scale factor such as 125% (Méven Car, Spectacle 21.08.1).
- A regression has been corrected in the way that the decoration buttons of the Breeze theme windows were displayed in the windows of the GTK header bar (Emilio Cobos Álvarez, Plasma 5.22.5).
- The system monitor no longer displays IPv4 address information when IPv6 has been disabled (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22.5).
- Wayland improvements:
- Copying text from notifications using any medium now works (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23).
- Middle click to paste now works between native Wayland and XWayland applications (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23).
- DPI-based scaling works again (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.23).
- The cursor now shows animated information about the icons when launching applications (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23).
- Fixed one of the ways the lock screen could break (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.23).
- Pop-up windows for Comboboxes in QtQuick applications now display correctly in RTL languages (Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.86).
Improvements in the user's interface
- Now you can copy the text of Plasma notifications with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + C (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23).
- Dragging windows now only snaps them to the edges of other windows that are on the same virtual desktop (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23).
- Now you can change the manual speed setting for wired Ethernet connections to more values (David Hummel, Plasma 5.23).
- The Global Menu applet now looks more like a menu (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.23).
- The media player widget now always shows the album art and its blurred background at the same time, even when the album art is read from a slow location (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.23).
- The loading spinner has been unified in Plasma, in the KDE applications and on the home screen, and now it looks like a spinning gear (Björn Feber, Plasma 5.23 and Frameworks 5.86).
- The shadows of popups, dialogs, OSDs and Plasma notifications have been made a bit smoother, visually pleasing and more consistent with the shadows of application windows (Niccolò Venerandi, Frameworks 5.86).
When will all this get to the KDE desktop
Plasma 5.22.5 will arrive on August 31 and on September 2 we will be able to use KDE Gear 21.08.1. At the moment there is no specific date for KDE Gear 21.12, but they will arrive in December. KDE Frameworks 5.86 will arrive on September 11, and Plasma 5.23 will land with the new theme, among other things, on October 12.
To enjoy all this as soon as possible we have to add the KDE Backports repository or use an operating system with special repositories like Kde neon or any distribution whose development model is Rolling Release, although the latter usually take a little longer than the KDE system.