Quiet weeks in KDE. Or not. We don't really know how the work rate is going these days on the K team, but we can assume that it is high. The thing is that it is not reflected too much in the articles of This Week in KDE: two weeks ago there was no article and today's is not particularly long, but I would sign that this happen every week and that the big February release arrives bordering on perfection.
Plasma 6 will be the next version of the KDE graphical environment, and it will be a major update. As if that were not enough, it will be accompanied by Frameworks 6 and Qt6, many changes that require walking on eggshells, being very careful so that the user experience is not diminished. We will see what happens, but we will see it at the end of February, so there are still almost 4 months left. What comes next is the News list This week.
News coming to KDE Plasma 6
- Discover now has a better way of presenting app ratings: it now shows a big summary of the ratings with quotes from the best ones, and you can still read them all in a pop-up window like before (Marco Martin).
- Discover search has been greatly improved and now generally always returns the results you would expect when searching for something that exists and is available (Marco Martin):
- The Power Savings page in System Preferences has been rewritten in QML, fixing all open bug reports from the old one, and has a nicer, easier to decipher visual layout (Jakob Petsovits):
- Plasma styles without the grouped task indicator SVG (of which Breeze is now one) now use a fancy new style for displaying grouped tasks (Nate Graham):
- Line charts with limited vertical space in System Monitor and the Plasma widgets of the same name no longer have their legends cut off (Arjen Hiemstra):
- Pen input using a graphics tablet can now be manually remapped to the entire screen area (Aki Sakurai).
- Transient dialog windows (i.e. windows that are closed with the Escape key and are normally opened from another window, such as configuration dialogs) are now handled in the Plasma Wayland session as in X11: they no longer appear in Task Manager as separate windows, they propagate the “needs attention” status to their parents, etc. (Kai Uwe Broulik).
- Ark can now extract files from multi-volume ZIP archives (Ilya Pominov, Ark 24.02).
- When using “Repeat this track” mode in Elisa, manually skipping forward or back to the next or previous track now works as expected (Quinten Kock).
- The KRunner web shortcut manager now has two new entries: Codeberg and PyPi (Except Tomaselli).
Correction of minor bugs
- Fixed an extremely subtle bug that could cause Plasma or KWin to crash randomly when files being watched for changes got certain types of changes with certain timings, which in Qt 6 was made easier to trigger when changing Kate profiles o Konsole while KRunner's Kate Sessions or Konsole Profiles runners were active (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0 and Plasma 5.27.10 with Frameworks 5.112. Link)
- It is no longer possible for the screen locker to break when there are an extremely large number of session restored apps, or any of the session restored apps do something bad and silently exhaust the system's session restore resources. Instead, when any of these things happen, Plasma will warn and prevent resource depletion (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0. Link)
- When using NetworkManager 1.44, restarting the NetworkManager system service - which sometimes occurs automatically when the computer goes to sleep and wakes up again - no longer causes the Networks widget in the system tray to disappear or stop displaying networks (Ilya Katsnelson, Frameworks 5.112. Link).
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 98 bugs.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.10 will arrive on December 10, Frameworks 112 on November 11, and 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.
Header image: montage from photo from Pixabay.