KDE He had been dropping two bombs for two weeks (stacking system y most powerful spectacle, and this week they have done something similar, as long as Wayland and several monitors are used. Support for fractional scaling under Wayland is now ready, and they've also fixed how it behaves in multi-screen setups. All of this should arrive in Plasma 5.27, but full support is only for Qt 6, so we'll have to keep waiting. It is the bad thing about these articles: their author makes us long teeth with what we can do in the future, but that, not yet.
The more detailed information is in the link that we will provide at the bottom of this article. As always, what we are going to do here is put the new arrivals that Nate Graham mentioned this week, and these ones from Wayland are too big and too detailed to put here. So this is what happened this week in KDE.
New Features Coming to KDE
- The order of tasks in the Plasma Task Manager widget can now be reversed in vertical panels, to complement existing support for horizontal panels (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 5.27).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, apps using XWayland can now be allowed to snoop on keystrokes made in native Wayland apps, mimicking how things work in X11. This is required by some apps that use XWayland, such as Discord for its push-to-talk feature. Doing this reduces security, so it is disabled by default and has different activation levels so that we can choose for ourselves the balance between security and support for legacy applications (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27):
- It is now possible to use a modifier key (for example, the Meta key) as a hotkey when using the input key chooser to assign shortcuts to actions. This will allow us to replace the weird old modifier key handling in KWin and allow us to simply assign modifier keys to things like Kickoff and Overview directly. It's not ready yet, but it will be soon. (Aleix Pol González, Plasma 5.27 and Frameworks 5.102).
- Discover now has a SteamOS backend, so you can perform system updates on Steam Deck devices from desktop mode (Jeremy Whiting, Plasma 5.27, but possibly backported to SteamOS itself earlier).
Improvements in the user's interface
- Spectacle's sidebar now uses push buttons to take a new screenshot, replacing the old two-step UI where you first had to choose a capture mode and then click the "Take New Screenshot" button. ». The new workflow should be much faster (Noah Davis, Spectacle 23.04):
- Spectacle's new annotation system redraws shadows behind the annotations by default, like the old one did (Marco Martin, Spectacle 23.04).
- KRunner no longer matches application executable names, as this caused too many false positives when looking for unrelated things (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.27).
- The User Feedback slider has been removed from the Quick Settings page of System Preferences, because starting with Plasma 5.27 we will have the opportunity to choose whether or not to share telemetry data with KDE developers in the new application from the welcome wizard (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27).
- On the Desktop Session page of System Preferences, the "Provide shutdown options" option has been removed, because we realized it didn't actually do anything anymore after all the changes over the past few years (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27 ).
- Adding new virtual desktops now increases the number given to the new desktop, instead of naming all new desktops "New Desktop" (Thenujan Sandramohan, Plasma 5.27).
- When changing indexing settings that require a restart to take effect in the Search for Files page of System Preferences, a message will now be presented informing you of this, with a big friendly button that you can click to restart immediately (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27):
- When creating window rules and trying to match windows by their window class, the page will now give an understandable error message when we point to a window that doesn't have a window class (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.27):
Correction of minor bugs
- Disabling middle mouse click paste in Plasma Wayland session no longer prevents typing text in some GTK applications (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26.5).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, external displays now work when using multiple ARM devices (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.26.5).
- When Discover installs updates for a plugin from store.kde.org that needs to present an error message or question as part of the update process, or attempts to do so because the update failed, Discover now shows it to you instead of silently eating it up and leave him wondering why things don't work (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27).
- The Blend Changes KWin effect is no longer triggered when the foreground window is full screen, so when using the "Accent color from wallpaper" option and a slide background, you no longer experience, for example, the brief choppiness while watching a full screen video when the wallpaper changes (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.26.5).
- Turning the top left screen off and back on no longer causes it to mirror the screen on the right after turning it back on (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27).
- The "Add Rule" dialog in the Firewall page of System Preferences now works correctly for the ufw firewall (Paul Worall, Plasma 5.27).
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 102 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.26.5 will arrive on Tuesday, January 3 and Frameworks 5.102 should arrive on the 14th of the same month. Plasma 5.27 will arrive on February 14, and KDE Applications 23.04 is only known to 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.
Images and content: pointieststick.com.