En KDE enthusiasm and concern are breathed in almost equal parts. This year they will move up to Plasma 6.0, and they will also start using Qt6, and that jump will be big. This week Nate Graham mentioned that applications written in Qt, including all KDE software, will survive Wayland crashes. Soon they hope to achieve the same in GTK as well, which is the interface/library that most GNOME applications rely on.
But thinking about the future does not mean that we forget about the present, and they are also taking advantage of the time to fix the bugs de plasma 5.27, the last version to carry a 5 in the first digit. The list of news this week is the one you have below.
New Features Coming to KDE
- Konsole now works on Windows. In addition to making the app potentially distributable on Windows, this means that KDE apps distributed on Windows that have an embedded Konsole view like Kate can now embed the Konsole itself, rather than a lower terminal view (Waqar Ahmed and Christoph Cullmann , Konsole and Kate 23.04).
- It is now possible to configure Kickoff Application Launcher to use a grid layout for everything, not just the Favorites view (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 6.0):
Improvements in the user's interface
- Spectacle now always displays a notification when a screenshot of a rectangular region is taken in background mode (with Meta+Shift+PrintScreen by default) and no longer closes if its parent window is open while the notification is gone (Noah Davis, Spectacle 23.04).
- For new users (not existing users), the system will now sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity by default, and will generate correct power profiles for convertible laptops (Plasma 5.27.3, Nate Graham).
- On Discover app pages, button rows now become columns for narrow windows or the mobile interface, and their layout has also been streamlined and improved (Emil Velikov, Plasma 5.27.3):
- The Welcome Center now has a design adapted to mobile devices. The content itself is still pretty desktop-centric, but this too will change soon (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0):
- In the Plasma Wayland session, the Ctrl+Alt+Scroll Up/Down shortcut that switches between virtual desktops has been changed to Meta+Alt+Scroll Up/Down to avoid blocking application-specific shortcuts and also to generally comply with the standard for global actions to use the Meta key (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0)
- Improved how the SDDM login screen works with a touch screen in the Plasma Wayland session: touch input works at all, tapping the soft keyboard button now opens it, and the keyboard layout list now it can be scrolled with a swipe (Aleix Pol Gonzalez and Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27.3 and Frameworks 5.104.
Correction of minor bugs
- KRuler now works correctly on Wayland, and can now be moved or resized like in X11 (Shenleban Tongying, KRuler 23.04).
- Fixed another way in which the powerdevil power management subsystem could crash with certain multi-display setups (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.3).
- Fixed a way that apps could crash in the Plasma Wayland session when a screen goes to sleep (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.3).
- Color Night now works on ARM devices that do not support "Gamma LUTs" but do support "Color Transform Matrixes". It still doesn't work on NVIDIA GPUs because they don't support any of them (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.27.3).
- The red and blue color channels are no longer sometimes swapped during screencasting in the Plasma Wayland session (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.3).
- Image buttons in Breeze-themed GTK apps now display correctly (Janet Blackquill, Plasma 5.27.3).
- Fixed two major bugs in Plasma related to actions that displayed window thumbnails in the Task Manager (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.104).
- When using KDE applications outside of Plasma, you should no longer get a strange color scheme that interferes with the color scheme set by the target platform (Jan Grulich, Frameworks 5.105).
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 101 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.3 will arrive on March 14, KDE Frameworks 104 will arrive on the 11th, 105 should arrive on April 9, and there is no news on Frameworks 6.0. KDE Gear 23.04 will be available from April 20.
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.
Let's see if you document yourself a bit. I am a KDE Neon user on my professional team and Kubuntu 22,10. Frameworks 5.104 came out on March 4 as a development version for a global release on the 11th, that is, today. They put it very clearly and in Spanish on their website. But you insist If I were a linux newbie I would be pissed because 7 days later no sign of the update. (Note, if it has been in the Lunar Lobster beta repositories since it was launched) but KDE Neón has received it at 16:00 p.m. Spanish time and Kubuntu to know, but it shouldn't take long because the work has been done for Lunar.
Thank you for your work but please, inform yourself a little that it does not cost anything.
All the best
I'm sorry if my comment seemed inappropriate to you, it wasn't the intention, it's because all the blogs I follow see a lot of misinformation. I understand that there are many distros, many updates and a lot of history.
On the other hand, say that the update to 5.104 has already arrived through the backports and the Kubuntu ppa staging-frameworks.