During the last seven days there has been a piece of news that Nate Graham did not include in his article This Week on KDE: when Plasma 6 will arrive. There is no exact date, but there is a month: February 2024. It will be approximately a year after the last update of the KDE graphical environment, without counting the point ones, and they have reasons: to polish everything so that it works as best as possible. And that work also includes making the pieces of Qt6, Frameworks 6 and the applications (KDE Gear) adapted to those libraries fit together.
This week's article has told us only one new function, more specifically that the first page of the welcome center can be customized by distributions. This way it can show the Kubuntu logo and information when starting Kubuntu, from Manjaro if used in the popular distro based on Arch, or Debian, Fedora... What you have below is the rest of the list of new features.
Interface improvements coming to KDE
- The KDE desktop portal implementation now supports the new cross-desktop accent color standard (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.8).
- The separator line between the title bar/toolbar area in KDE applications and the content below it is now drawn with the correct stroke weight with a high DPI display (Carl Schwan, Plasma 5.27.8).
- KRunner powered searches now only show the sleep modes actually supported by the system, and can now also be found by searching for the word "power" (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.0).
- More work to improve cursor responsiveness and reduce power consumption in Plasma wayland session (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0).
- Low and critically low battery notifications are now written shorter and clearer (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0).
- The lock/logout widget no longer changes height when set to display only one item (Yannick, Plasma 6.0).
- Improved keyboard navigation and accessibility properties of the Discover review viewer and entry page (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.0).
Correction of minor bugs
- Fixed a bug in Dolphin that could cause the view to not show the correct files after deleting the text entered in the search field (Amol Godbole, Dolphin 24.02).
- When running in a VM, Plasma now disables auto-sleep as it can sometimes cause the VM to hang (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27.8).
- Hybrid suspension now works (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27.8. Link).
- The System Preferences Accessibility page no longer erroneously asks to save changes when you exit it without making any changes (Jürgen Dev, Plasma 5.27.8).
- The Baloo file indexing service no longer re-indexes everything after every reboot when using the Btrfs file system (Tomáš Trnka, Frameworks 6.0).
- The file dialog is again capable of saving to files with quotes in their names (Andreas Bontozoglou, Frameworks 6.0).
- In several QtWidgets-based applications, star ratings are no longer inaccurate when using icon themes that lack the rating icon (Felix Ernst, Frameworks 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 110 bugs.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.8 will arrive on Tuesday, September 12, if there is no change in plans, Frameworks 110 should arrive later today and there is still no confirmed date about Frameworks 6.0. KDE Gear 23.08.1 will be available on September 14, KDE Gear 24.02 will arrive sometime in February, the same month that Plasma 6 will arrive. The exact arrival date is not known, but there is a page where they will report about the releases of the next version of the KDE desktop.
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.