As already forward last week, nate graham has released Today a new section in your articles of This Week on KDE. In that new section he will tell us which very high priority bugs have been fixed in Plasma, and this week they have fixed three of them. They currently have 26 bugs identified (29 last week), and they hope to lower that number with each new version of Plasma they release to us.
One of those bugs will no longer be present in Plasma 5.25.5, the next update to KDE's graphical environment. Graham has not said that they will do the back port so that it can also be used in Plasma 5.24.7, so for now, those who want to make sure of taking advantage of all the new features should use the latest versions. Below is the list with news that they have advanced today.
As new features they have only mentioned one: you can now configure a keyboard shortcut to activate Present Windows by displaying only the windows of the current application that are on the current desktop (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.26).
Very high priority bugs
- System Monitor widgets no longer reset various settings to their default values after a system reboot (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25.5).
- It is again possible to select windows on other screens using the Present Windows and Overview effects (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26).
- Application launcher widgets that are activated by pressing the Meta key no longer require the Alt+F1 shortcut to be set, which should drastically reduce instances of pressing the Meta key and nothing happens. Also, now when there is more than one launcher that wants to open with the Meta key, it will open on the screen that KWin considers active (David Redondo, Plasma 5.26).
15 minute bugs fixed
The total number has dropped from 51 to 50; one has been added and two have been corrected.
- Kickoff no longer weirdly pre-selects items in the search results list that are not the first after having previously selected the item at that position using the cursor the last time something was searched for (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25.5).
- Hovering over an item in Kickoff no longer repeatedly reselects it if the keyboard is used to select something else (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25.5).
Interface improvements coming to KDE
- It is now much easier to initially set up a Samba sharing folder, because the wizard now gives detailed and actionable error messages (Nate Graham, kdenetwork-filesharing 22.12).
- Plasma's timer widget has received a major overhaul that fixes most open bugs and improves the UI to add a clickable start/stop button (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26).
- Searching for widgets in the Widget Browser now also matches your keywords, providing another way to find what you're looking for (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.26).
- Menu shortcuts are now displayed in a faint gray color, which visually de-emphasizes them compared to the menu item text (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.26).
- The Breeze icon theme now includes icons for Windows DLLs (Alexander Wilms, Frameworks 5.97).
Other fixes and performance improvements
- In Okular, it is no longer possible to drag popup notes off the screen (Nikola Nikolic, Okular 22.12).
- The first time KRunner is opened, it no longer strangely slides up from nowhere; now it always slides down from what is above it as expected (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.24.7).
- In Plasma Wayland session, monitors no longer sometimes lose their names and cannot be set as the primary (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.7).
- The Breeze style reverts to respecting the "Small Icons" size that can be set in System Preferences (Alexander Kernozhitsky, Plasma 5.25.5).
- The KScreen display management service is now more forgiving when it comes to detecting displays as unique, which should fix several strange desktop and screen layout issues caused by hot-plugging displays and docks on which both display ID and connector ID change during hot plug (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.26).
- The language setting in System Preferences now updates the standard FreeDesktop value org.freedesktop.Accounts.User.Language which is used by Flatpak applications and many third-party applications in general, so they should now also use the preferred language ( Han Young, Plasma 5.26).
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.25.5 will arrive on Tuesday, September 6, Frameworks 5.97 will be available on August 13 and KDE Gear 22.08 on August 18. Plasma 5.26 will be available from October 11. KDE Applications 22.12 does not yet have an official release date scheduled.
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.