With already published the (short) GNOME news article, now it is the turn of KDE. The K project has continued along its lines, telling us about dozens of changes they are working on, but there is one that stands out above the rest, one of those that does not change our lives for the better, but is obvious and it's nice to see it. It is a simple transition that we will see when changing from one color scheme to another.
As someone who is testing Wayland on KDE, I would also highlight another new feature that you will also see, and in this case feel: the gesture to see the overview by swiping four fingers up now follows the speed of our hand. You have this and the rest of news this week below, although those who want to see everything in more detail should visit the original article published by NateGraham.
As for 15 minute bugs, they fixed 1, so the list is down from 76 to 75: Accent colors no longer get a bit darker when using a dark base color scheme (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25) .
New Features Coming to KDE
- When changing the color scheme, the screen now smoothly intersects between the old and new colors (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25).
- The "About This System" page in the Information Center now displays more relevant hardware information, such as product name, manufacturer, and serial number (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25).
- The Plasma Wayland session has gained support for the "screen session restore" protocol, which means that Flatpak-wrapped apps that implement it (like OBS since version 27.2.0) won't have to ask for permission to restore the screen every time they are cast after granting it once (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25).
- There is now a new "Crashed Processes Viewer" application that can be used to graphically view the crashes collected by coredumpctl and access their developer details (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.25).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- KIO no longer crashes when trying to open an unreadable file in an SFTP location (Harald Sitter, kio-extras 22.04).
- Album list views in Elisa no longer display tracks in the wrong order (Nate Graham, Elisa 22.08).
- In the Plasma Wayland session:
- Fixed a case where a misbehaving application could cause KWin to crash (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24.5).
- Changing display settings in certain ways (eg rotating and moving a display without also changing its refresh rate) no longer sometimes causes KWin to crash (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.5).
- When a window requests activation using the official Wayland activation protocol in order to bring up its own window, but this is denied by KWin for whatever reason, the window's Task Manager icon now uses the orange background color "needs attention », as in X11 (Aleix Pol González, Plasma 5.24.5).
- Now appears on active screen when displayed, just like in X11 (Martin Seher, Plasma 5.25).
- The Global Menu widget now works correctly when its optional "be a hamburger menu" mode that is often used for vertical panels is activated (David Redondo, Plasma 5.24.5).
- Discover no longer sometimes hangs forever when visiting its "About" page (Aleix Pol González, Frameworks 5.94).
- Kate, KWrite and other KTextEditor based applications no longer crash when defining a new file type for the application to open (Waqar Ahmed, Frameworks 5.94).
- Checkboxes and radio buttons in Plasma are no longer sometimes blurred, cut off at the bottom, or slightly squashed when using certain combinations of fonts and font sizes (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.94).
- Places Panels in Dolphin, open/save dialogs, Gwenview, and all other QtWidgets-based applications are now touch-friendly (Steffen Hartlieb, Frameworks 5.94).
Improvements in the user's interface
- Elisa's playlist now displays adjacent songs from different albums in a much more compact and beautiful way (Tranter Madi, Elisa 22.08).
- Elisa now displays Bit Rate and Sample Rate metadata using sensible units (Jack Hill, Elisa 22.04).
- The color theme settings page in Kate and KWrite has received a major UI overhaul (Waqar Ahmed, Kate & KWrite 22.08).
- In Kate and KWrite, typing an opening bracket character now automatically inserts the closing bracket after the text insertion point by default (Christoph Cullmann, Kate & KWrite 22.08).
- The four-finger swipe up gesture to open the overview effect now follows the fingers (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25).
- The grid widget now displays the relevant context items in the expanded view of each list item, instead of a context menu. This makes them more discoverable and fully compatible with touch (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25).
- The Window List applet has been rewritten to modernize and future proof its codebase, which also makes it keyboard navigable and displays the icon and name of the active window in its version of Panel, just like the classic Mac OS window menu (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25) did.
- The "RGB Range" and "Overscan" controls on the Display Settings page of System Preferences now have help buttons that you can click or hover over to learn what they do, as these are fairly technical features that they need some explanation (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.25).
- The System Preferences power saving page now shows percentage labels next to the two brightness sliders (Edo Friedman, Plasma 5.25).
- KRunner help button now disappears when help runner is disabled (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25).
- Placeholder messages in Kirigami and Plasma-based KDE applications are now more readable, nicer looking, and with slight visual differences between action and informational messages (Felipe Kinoshita, Frameworks 5.94).
- Breeze theme "debug step" icons are now clearer and more visually pleasing (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.94).
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.24.5 will arrive on May 3, and Frameworks 5.94 will be available on the 14th of the same month. Plasma 5.25 will arrive as early as June 14, and KDE Gear 22.04 will land with new features on April 21. KDE Gear 22.08 does not yet have an official scheduled date.
To enjoy all this as soon as possible we have to add the repository backports from KDE or use an operating system with special repositories like Kde neon or any distribution whose development model is Rolling Release, although the latter usually take a little longer than the KDE system