Nate Graham, one of the main people in charge of the KDE project, said that everything had gone very well with the launch of plasma 5.24. Everything seemed in good shape, but a week later 5.24.1 arrived with many fixes. In 5.24.2 it seemed that everything was better, but users have been finding bugs in the last two weeks and many of them will be corrected again in Plasma 5.24.3, but that already in March.
This is how Graham started his this week's entry at KDE, saying that everything seemed to be going perfectly fine, but that the community is finding bugs and the project is working hard to fix them. What has dropped this week is the number of 15-minute bugs, after several weeks remaining at 83. Now that type of bugs has remained at 80. Below you have the list with all future news that have been mentioned today.
15 minute bugs resolved
The list is in this link, and the corrected has been the following:
- You will no longer see an unnecessary "Connection activated" notification right after login (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.2).
- Desktop and panel mappings in multi-screen setups should now be much more robust, as invalid screen inputs will no longer be added under certain circumstances (Plasma 5.24.3, Marco Martin).
- Fixed one of the most common cases of Plasma crashing when starting the Plasma Wayland session when having a multi-monitor setup (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25).
New Features Coming to KDE
- Skanpage now allows sharing of scanned documents (including multi-page PDFs) using the standard KDE sharing system (Alexander Stippich, Skanpage 22.04).
- The user avatar can now be changed to be an abstract "user" icon in front of a colored background of our choosing (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25).
- Added a bunch of new web search queries for KRunner(Thiago Sueto, Frameworks 5.92).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- Using Ark to extract Zip files with empty folders no longer causes those folders to have "last accessed" dates set to sometime in the future (Albert Astals Cid, Ark 21.12.3).
- Ark can now successfully create multipart 7zip archives, each of which is less than 1Mb (Max Brazhnikov, Ark 21.12.3).
- Kate jumps back to the previously opened tab when the current tab is closed (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 22.04).
- Dolphin's main view now correctly handles right-to-left languages (Jan Blackquill, Dolphin 22.04).
- Fixed a visual glitch in Dolphin's main view that could be activated when zoomed (Eugene Popov, Dolphin 22.04).
- Fixed a recent big regression in multi-monitor+multi-GPU setups in the Plasma Wayland session (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.3).
- Right-clicking an application's icon in the System Tray no longer causes the right-clicked application to be activated when left-clicking other Task Manager items (Ishmael Asensio, Plasma 5.24.3).
- Changes can be reapplied in the system settings touchpad page (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.24.3).
- The process
plasma_sessionno longer leaks a lot of memory (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24.3). - Adjusting the screen backlight now always works when using certain types of multi-GPU systems (Xingang Li, Plasma 5.24.3).
- Discover no longer occasionally displays firmware or app text styling incorrectly (Tobias Fella, Plasma 5.24.3).
- File dialogs now open faster when your initial view is a network location (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.24.3).
- The System Preferences firewall page no longer always indicates that the default policy is "Allow", regardless of what the system default policy is (Lucas Biaggi, Plasma 5.25).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, launching DBus-enabled GTK3 applications now works (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.92).
Improvements in the user's interface
- Elisa's playlist has been mostly rewritten to use standard Kirigami components, which fixes multiple bugs, such as touch scrolling not working and reordering songs in the playlist being unreliable, it halves the number of lines of code, simplifies implementation, and improves presentation (Tranter Madi, Elisa 22.04).
- Kate's quick search bar (invoked with Ctrl+F) no longer replaces the status bar while visible (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 22.04).
- Added tooltips and extensive help text to Gwenview's "Snap" and "Show Thumbnails" buttons (Felix Ernst, Gwenview 22.04).
- Our name is no longer bypassed on the login screen when it is longer than 11 characters and there is more than one user account on the system (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.3).
- When offline updates are being used, and an offline update has not completed, and Discover shows a notification with the option to "Repair the system", clicking that button now provides some feedback on what it's doing, and it also tells when the repair operation succeeds or fails (Aleix Pol González, Plasma 5.25).
- Discover now shows a message in the app when we are running an old unsupported version of our distro, and prompts us to update (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25).
- Breeze themed tab bars now have better contrast against dark color schemes (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25).
- Kirigami FormLayout section headers are now bold, so they stand out visually from their section content (Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.92).
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.24.3 is coming March 8, and KDE Frameworks 5.92 will follow four days later, on the 12th. Plasma 5.25 will arrive on June 14th. Gear 21.12.3 will be available from March 3, and KDE Gear 22.04 on April 21.
To enjoy all this as soon as possible we have to add the repository backports from KDE or use an operating system with special repositories like Kde neon or any distribution whose development model is Rolling Release, although the latter usually take a little longer than the KDE system.