Last Wednesday a new era began in KDE. I arrive Plasma 6, with many new features and a maturity that is expected to leave behind the bad reputation that the desktop received in the past. And a few years ago it was common to see crash errors constantly, but those times seem to be behind us, as Nate Graham says in the last entry about news of the week in KDE.
In general, the launch was "smooth", calm. Most of the response comments were positive, and even messages pointing in this direction were published on social networks. There only seemed to be problems in KDE neon, the normal thing, at the blacksmith's house..., but they have already released an update that should fix the bugs where they have appeared the most. What follows is the list with the news that has taken place this week, because although it may not seem like it and it came out on a Sunday, that is what this article is about.
New Features Coming to KDE
- There is a new KWin effect called "Hide Cursor" (disabled by default for now) that will automatically hide the pointer after a period of inactivity. Not them, but me: this can come in handy combined with the option to display the pointer in large size by quickly moving the mouse/touchpad (Jin Liu, Plasma 6.1).
- On the Legacy App Permissions page of System Preferences, there is now an option to allow XWayland apps to also listen to mouse buttons (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.1).
Interface improvements
- The message displayed on widgets not supported by Plasma 6 is now clearer (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.1, although it could end up being backported to 6.0.1 or 6.0.2):
- When we try to activate the Cube effect with less than 3 virtual desktops, it will now tell us why it doesn't work and ask us to add more virtual desktops to make it work (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1):
- The default top left hot corner that activates Overview closes the effect again if we activate it a second time, while Overview is still open (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0.1).
- Updated several System Preferences pages to move buttons from the bottom to the top and make placeholder messages more consistent (Shubham Arora, Nate Graham, Fushan Wen, and Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.1).
- In Kirigami-based applications, the animation used when turning from one page to another is now much nicer and smoother (Devin Lin, Frameworks 6.1).
- That awkward little line on Kirigami-based application toolbars that separates the sidebar from the content area now looks like a normal toolbar separator line (Carl Schwan, Frameworks 6.1):
Correction of minor bugs
- Taking a screenshot in Spectacle immediately after a screen recording now works (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.02.1).
- VLC full screen mode works again (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0.1).
- Fixed a source of brief screen freezes in the X11 session (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0.1).
- Fixed a random crash in Plasma (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.1).
- Dragging files or folders from the desktop to another screen no longer causes them to temporarily disappear, and the fix for this issue also fixes a bug in Plasma that could be caused by dragging files or folders from the desktop to a visible folder in Dolphin (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.1).
- Clicking the “Defaults” button on the System Preferences task switcher page no longer breaks the task switcher until it is manually chosen again (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.1).
- When a popup panel is open, clicking something else in the panel re-activates that thing instead of simply closing the open popup panel (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0.1).
- There is once again a blue outline around the active (and now mouseover) virtual desktop in the Desktop Grid view of the Preview effect (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.0.1).
- When you right-click a panel in Auto-Hide mode and select "Add Widgets...", the panel no longer closes again right after the Widget Explorer opens, which previously prevented you from actually adding widgets. a widget to the panel that way (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.0.1).
- In the Tile Editor screen, you can no longer break the layout of tiles by dragging slices on top of other slices (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.0.1).
- Clicking on the Overview effect search field no longer closes (Patrik Fábián, Plasma 6.0.1).
- Saving changes made to commands assigned to global shortcuts now works (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0.1).
- Fixed some bugs with the new Cube effect: panning zoom now goes in the expected direction, and zooming out too far no longer crops the cube (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0.1).
- When sending a file to a Bluetooth device, the notification indicating the progress of the transfer no longer displays a broken link after the transfer is complete (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.0.1).
- MPV windows with “Keep Aspect Ratio” enabled can now fill the entire screen (Łukasz Patron, Plasma 6.1)
- The layout of the “Overwrite this file?” dialog box in “Get new [Thing]” windows is no longer visually broken (Akseli Lahtinen, Frameworks 6.1).
- Fixed an issue that could cause jagged horizontal lines to appear in System Monitor graphs and charts when using a fractional scaling factor with certain integrated Intel GPUs (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 6.1).
In total, 123 bugs have been fixed this week.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 6.0.1 will arrive next Tuesday, March 5, and Plasma 6.1 will arrive in June, on the 18th. Frameworks 6.1 will arrive on April 5 and KDE Gear 24.02.1 is scheduled for March 21. Looking at the page of these releases, it is confirmed that 24.02 will only have two maintenance updates, and probably in August it will return to the usual numbering/scheduling of a new major update in April-August-December.
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.