One of the changes that will come to the desktop KDE In February they will start using Wayland by default. Or rather, it is something that will arrive at that time in the stable version, since the project has decided to advance its plans in the versions that are currently in development. Plasma 6.0 is now available in alpha version, and you won't have to wait any longer. The intention is to have time and pave the way by the end of February 2024.
It seems like a logical move, not leaving for tomorrow what they can do today. In this case it is not leaving for the stable what you can leave for development, but there were several problems to solve before being able to take this step. There were three bugs that have already been corrected, so you can now switch to Wayland by default and polish things. What comes next is the News list that has taken place during the last week.
News coming to KDE Plasma 6
- The style of Breeze applications has received the visual overhaul: no more frames within frames. Instead, Breeze-themed apps adopt the clean design of modern Kirigami apps, with views separated from each other by single-pixel lines (Carl Schwan):
- In the Plasma Wayland session, there is now preliminary support for playing HDR-compatible games when using an HDR-compatible display (Xaver Hugl).
- Spectacle has gained support for rectangular region screen recording (Noah Davis).
- The Printers page in System Preferences has received a major overhaul and now includes internally the functions for which it used to direct external applications. The result is much nicer and more integrated, without a cascading soup of dialog windows (Mike Noe).
- The Plasma Panel settings have been redesigned again, and this time everything is in one dialog; No more nested submenus. This work has fixed 14 open bug reports (Niccolò Venerandi and Marco Martín):
- Ark is now significantly faster at compressing files using xz and zstd compression, as they are now multi-threaded (Zhangzhi Hu).
- When running Flatpak applications, we will no longer be asked to approve or deny “background activity” (David Edmundson).
- There is now a simple setting to disable notification sounds system-wide (Ismael Asensio):
- Plasma's startup time has been greatly improved, up to a few seconds (Harald Sitter).
- The double-click speed setting returns, now found on the General Behavior page of System Preferences (Nicolas Fella).
- Synchronizing Plasma settings with SDDM now also synchronizes the desired NumLock state at boot (Chandradeep Dey).
- In QtWidgets based applications, you can open the context menu of the selected thing with the shortcut Shift+F10 (Felix Ernst).
- You can now open System Monitor with the shortcut Meta+Escape (Arjen Hiemstra).
Correction of minor bugs
- Fixed a wide variety of multi-display issues involving screens sometimes not turning on at the right time or visually freezing until switching to and from another VT (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0).
- Fixed a bug that could cause the positions of desktop icons to not be remembered correctly, especially if the system had multiple displays connected (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.10).
- Fixed a bug that could cause Night Color to transition to night mode at inappropriate times when using a certain combination of settings (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.27.10).
- In case there is a window that does not set a minimum size, KWin no longer allows it to be resized to a width of zero pixels, which would make it invisible and impossible to find (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0)
- In the “Get new [thing]” dialogs, full item descriptions are now visible, instead of being cut off at some point (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 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 146 bugs.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.10 will arrive on December 10, Frameworks 112 should arrive later today 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.