The Akademy 2023 has just ended. It took place from July 15 to 21, and for this reason there was no entry of news in KDE last week, beyond a short one to explain just that. There have been times when a weak week in terms of news has given way to another with more "sweets" (they say "tidbits"), but that has not been fulfilled this time. The reason has once again been the Akademy, which although it is true that it has already ended, it is also true that it has left little room for other needs.
The good news for people who like to know what the future holds is that little margin is not equal to zero, so Nate Graham has been able to post some new arrivals. They are few, that is true, but, as has always been said, "less gives a stone." Also, some of the work isn't published because it's small bug fixes, and a lot of development is left to get the new Plasma 6 features working as smoothly as possible.
News coming to KDE
This week there is no separation of sections of new functions and improvements in the interface. The change point has been "Plasma and Frameworks 6", and in it they tell us that there are 59 open problems and:
- Plasma now plays a sound from the active sound theme when a USB device is plugged or unplugged. And this is configurable (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.0).
- You can now change the system's active power profile (if your firmware and kernel version are modern enough to support the feature) by pressing Meta+B to display a profile selector OSD similar to the one used to display display-related options (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.0):
- The Networks widget now displays an inline message asking you to connect to a network's Captive Portal page, if you have one (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.0. Link):
- Dolphin, Filelight, and the Disks and Devices widget now honor user choice of how to display binary units (eg MB or MiB) (Jack Hill, Frameworks 6).
- On the previous point, Graham writes another explaining that it exists and that almost nobody knows about it, because it is hidden and without a user interface. You have to add a line in a configuration file. It does not work correctly in Plasma 6, but for this version of the graphical environment that will arrive at the end of the year they will add a user interface.
- Frameworks 6 has gained support for playing sounds from FreeDesktop compatible sound themes (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 6.0).
Correction of minor bugs
- When zooming with a pinch gesture in Okular, the document no longer scrolls wildly (Nicolas Fella, Okular 23.08).
- The feature to focus a specific Plasma panel using a custom keyboard shortcut now works (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.7).
- Several settings now display correctly in the System Preferences touchpad page regardless of how the page is accessed (Méven Car, Plasma 6.0).
- Many more dual-GPU systems should now correctly detect both GPUs, allowing the system to be told to use the more powerful discrete GPU for certain applications (Dave Vasilevsky, Frameworks 5.109).
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 138 bugs.
plasma 5.27.7 will arrive on Tuesday, September 19, and there is no confirmed date on Frameworks 6.0 (5.109 should arrive on August 12). KDE Gear 23.08 will be available on August 24 and Plasma 6 will be available in the second half of 2023. There is still no official date confirmed, but there is a page where they will report about the releases of the next version of Plasma.
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. header image, rawpixels.