Last week, Nate Graham of KDE, published on his blog a bunch of fixes that will arrive in the medium term at the desk where he collaborates. Right now, what can already be installed is Plasma 5.27, an LTS version that they will continue to polish, but in the second half of 2023 the 666 will arrive, which we hope does not bring anything bad. And to prevent this from happening, they have put their batteries and have started a search and capture of failures that is giving great results.
Among KDE bugs in general there are of different importance. Some are no more than a minor nuisance, others sting a bit more, and others are very high priority. Well, of the latter, all but three have been solved. Hunting has been of such magnitude that no new function has been dealt with, but there has been, in addition to patches, Improvements in the user's interface.
User interface improvements coming to KDE
- In Elisa, double-clicking a song or clicking its "Play Now" button now puts your entire album in the playlist and starts playing from that song (Melissa Autumn and Nate Graham, Elisa 23.08).
- When annotating a screenshot in Spectacle, the annotations now have a nice outline so it's obvious how to select them (Noah Davis, Spectacle 23.08).
- In Plasma's Disks and Devices widget, you will no longer see a useless "Mount" action for MTP-connected devices (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27.5).
- The way to configure the panels is now much more visual, and includes explanations (Tanbir Jishan and Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.0):
- Discover now has smarter search behavior, giving more importance to direct matches to the title and to the words that appear in the title, instead of the description (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.0).
- Search results in Kickoff are now sorted in the same way as in KRunner and other searches performed with KRunner (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 6.0).
- It is now possible to perform math functions like sqrt() in KRunner without having to prepend an equal sign to the operation (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 6.0).
- When the current wallpaper image file is changed on disk, the wallpaper will be updated in real time (Oleg Solovyov, Plasma 6.0).
- It is now possible to convert to and from kilometers per hour using the "kph" keyword (June Knauth, Frameworks 5.106).
Correction of minor bugs
- Dolphin's selection mode is no longer inappropriately toggled on or off by the spacebar when pressed despite not being the assigned shortcut for that action, or when pressed while an interactive UI control is in focus (Eugene Popov, Dolphin 23.08 ).
- Fixed a recently introduced source of KWin crashes in the Plasma Wayland session when hovering over Task Manager icons or closing windows (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.5).
- System Preferences no longer crashes on startup when the activity database is corrupted (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27.5).
- Fixed another cause of screens overlapping by one pixel in multi-screen setups, leading to other weird bugs (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.5).
- When using a multi-screen layout, the lock screen unlock button now always works on first click (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.5).
- In notification history, long notification title text can no longer sometimes push the notification close button partially out of view (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.27.5).
- When connecting a Bluetooth device, the dividing line between connected and disconnected devices no longer briefly overlaps the connected device (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.5).
- Breeze-themed invisible progress bars throughout Qt software no longer sometimes consume CPU resources by animating while out of view (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27.5).
- Entering paths with spaces in the Properties dialog, Shortcuts page, and Autostart page of System Configuration now works correctly (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27.5 and Frameworks 5.106).
- Fixed several embarrassing design flaws in the KDE software when used with an RTL language (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27.5 and Frameworks 5.106).
- Fixed a major source of crashes when copying files in Dolphin and other applications (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 6.1).
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 208 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.5 will arrive on May 9th, KDE Frameworks 106 should arrive on the 13th of the same month and there is no confirmed date on Frameworks 6.0. KDE Gear 23.04.1 will be available from May 11, 23.08 will arrive in August, and Plasma 6 will arrive in the second half of 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.