It seems like KDE He has focused squarely on his future. Either that or there is little left to improve on what we have now at hand. The number of bugs fixed this week isn't high and there aren't many new features mentioned, resulting in a considerably shorter article than what we're used to from Nate Graham, who publishes these kinds of articles and, of course, pass, inform the community.
This week's article has been dubbed "for developers," something I didn't know what that meant at first. One possibility was that the improvements in KDE Plasma 6 will come especially to developers that they are already using that version of the desktop, which although it is true that it has not been officially released, it is also available in the Unstable version of KDE neon, the operating system used by most KDE developers. But at the end of the article they talked about a new website: KDE for Developers.
New Features Coming to KDE
As new features, this week they only mentioned two: that Okular allows to choose the default scaling mode when printing PDFs (Martin Schnitkemper, Okular 23.08) and that global themes can now set the size of the window border decoration, a change that will arrive in Plasma 6 and that has been introduced by the author of the article (Nate).
Not from KDE, but it affects its users: In Wayland, the sidebars and docks provided by QDockWidget now work much better.
Improvements in the user's interface
- Gwenview's color correction settings have been reworded to be more understandable and correct (Adam Fontenot, Gwenview 23.08).
- Applications that have been marked as "Favorites" in Kickoff/Kicker/Application Dashboard/etc now have more weight in KRunner search results (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 6.0).
- KRunner's own search history no longer includes searches made in other KRunner search tools, such as Kickoff (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 6.0).
- In the Clipboard widget, when generating a QR code for some text, it can now be dragged anywhere images can be dragged (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0).
- When a Flatpak app requests permission to run in the background, the way it is presented is now clearer and easier to use (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0).
- Metadata from Krita .kra files is now parsed, extracted, and displayed in the "Details" views of the properties dialog, the Dolphin info panel sidebar, etc. (Joshua Goins, Frameworks 6.0).
Correction of minor bugs
- When using the optional ddcutil support in Powerdevil, changing the brightness via any of the current methods now prioritizes changing the brightness of a laptop's built-in display, rather than just adjusting the brightness of an external display. Support for per-screen brightness control is under study and may appear in the future (Quang Ngô, Plasma 5.27.6).
- Category names in the Widget Explorer are translated again (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.27.6).
- When changing Global Themes or color schemes in System Preferences, the "Appearance" category list item no longer becomes temporarily invisible (Someone Awesome, Plasma 6.0).
- Windows marked "Show on Top" now stay where they are when the "Peeking Desktop" effect is invoked (Vlad Zahorodnii, 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 66 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.6 will arrive on Tuesday June 20, KDE Frameworks 107 should arrive next Saturday and there is no confirmed date on Frameworks 6.0. KDE Gear 23.04.2 will be available on June 8, 23.08 will arrive in August and Plasma 6 will arrive in the second half of 2023. Although there is no confirmed date, there is the page where they will report about the releases of the next version of Plasma.
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.