Nate Graham of KDE, has published a weekly article that at first seems shorter than usual, but it is not. There are not many points in the news section or in the interface improvements section, but there are quite a few in the error correction section, and that only mentions those that are of some importance. Therefore, one thing is clear: they are focused on polishing the existing.
But this may be a wrong impression. On hand they have to finish with Plasma 5.26 and prepare 5.27, which will be the last version of Plasma 5 before launching plasma 6. The sixth change of the first figure has already been mentioned today, and it is expected that this trend will continue in the coming weeks.
New Features Coming to KDE
- System Monitor (and widgets of the same name) can now detect and monitor the power usage of NVIDIA GPUs (Pedro Liberatti, Plasma 5.27)
- The current temperature can now be displayed in a badge overlaid on the icon of the Weather widget, both outside the System Tray and in the version of it (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.27.):
Improvements in the user's interface
- Okular's scrolling speed when using a touchpad is now significantly faster, and should generally match the speed at which everything scrolls when using a touchpad (Eugene Popov, Okular 23.04).
- In Discover's task progress sheet, progress bars are now much more visible and are not obscured by a meaningless background highlight effect (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26.4. Link):
- When songs/tracks are changed and the Plasma Media Player widget is visible, there is no longer a short blink revealing the icon of the application playing the media (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26.4).
- A better error message is now displayed when the Bluetooth file transfer service does not start (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27).
- Discover will no longer attempt to check for updates when using a metered Internet connection (Bernardo Gomes Negri, Plasma 6).
Correction of minor bugs
- Fixed a major 15 minute bug, the one in Discover when it shows significant errors. These errors now take the form of normal dialogs, instead of a mini overlay at the bottom of the screen that disappears after a few seconds. Also, in general it should show fewer errors (Jakub, Narolewski and Aleix Pol González, Plasma 5.27).
- When Konsole is launched after changing the screen layout, its main window is no longer absurdly small (Vlad Zahorodnii, Konsole 22.12).
- Elisa should no longer occasionally stutter during playback (Roman Lebedev, Elisa 23.04).
- When using the Latte Dock in the Plasma Wayland session, various Plasma windows and popups are no longer mispositioned (David Redondo, Latte Dock 0.10.9).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, Plasma should no longer randomly crash when the cursor is moved over a Plasma panel (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.26.4).
- When Kickoff is set to use the default size of list items, apps that live in the category sidebar, like the Help Center, no longer have an uncomfortably large icon (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26.4).
- KWin now respects the "Panel Orientation" property that the kernel can set for screens, which means that many different types of devices that require the screen to be rotated by default will now do so automatically (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27).
- Several Plasma UI elements return to the correct size in X11 Plasma session when Qt scaling is not chosen (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.101).
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 137 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.26.4 will arrive on Tuesday, November 29 and Frameworks 5.101 will be available on December 3. Plasma 5.27 will arrive on February 14, and KDE Applications 22.12 will be available on December 8; from 23.04 it is only known that they will arrive in April 2023..
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.
Information and images: pointieststick.com.