Taking a quick look at the news this week en KDE, the headline of this article was going to be longer than a day without bread. But in the end it has been trimmed down by adding only one application that is mentioned a lot and a very aesthetic change. The app that will get a lot of improvements is Discover, the project's software hub, and the aesthetic change will come when you right-click on a file, go to "open with," and select "another app."
Currently, the option to open with another app is seen as a list. In the future we will be able to see what appears at the top of this post: it is a bit the same, but the icons are larger, which is more aesthetic. As to Wayland, it's not that KDE forgot to go ahead with it; is that much of what they included were bug fixes, and for a few weeks now these articles have only mentioned new features, interface tweaks and bugs, but relatively important ones.
New Features Coming to KDE
- Added the ability to rebind multi-button mouse buttons. Buttons can be assigned to keystrokes or keyboard shortcuts (David Redondo, for Plasma 5.26).
- Elisa now defaults to saving playlist files with relative paths internally when the music files they refer to are in the same folder, which is what most music players do, but this can be changed if you prefer your playlist files to always contain absolute paths (Yerrey Dev, Elisa 22.12).
- Kate now has a keyboard macro feature (Pablo Rauzy, Plasma 5.26).
- Discover now allows you to choose how often it notifies you of new updates. And within those frequencies, it is now less aggressive when it comes to notifying; Gone is the experience of updating, rebooting, and then immediately being notified about another update. Lastly, this frequency interface also controls the frequency of automatic updates, if enabled. (Aleix Pol González, Plasma 5.26).
Improvements in the user's interface
- Dolphin no longer uselessly says "Action canceled by user" when canceling an operation before committing or completing it (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.08.1).
- When using Discover in mobile/narrow mode, clicking an unrelated category in the drawer now automatically closes the drawer (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25.5).
- The System Preferences Audio page now features a simplified layout with smaller list items so that the entire view is not consumed by a few audio devices (Oliver Beard, Plasma 5.26).
- The application selection dialog for sandbox/portal applications has significantly improved keyboard navigation (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26).
- The Discover Updates page now shows the correct installed version for Firmware updates and no longer shows both the version number and branch name for Flatpak apps and runtimes, which was confusing in the case of make the app branch name look like a version number, so it looked like the app had two version numbers (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26).
- Discover screenshots now also support animated images (Ellie Dent, Plasma 5.26).
- Cursor position is now remembered via display fixes (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.26).
- Path slashes in several KDE applications like Dolphin and Gwenview now accept relative paths (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.98).
- Kate and other KTextEditor-based applications now support various mouse-based methods for adding more cursors using the multi-cursors feature (Waqar Ahmad, KDE Frameworks 5.98).
Significant bug fixes
- Filelight reuses correct text colors with a dark color scheme and looks good when using a fractional scale factor (Harald Sitter, Filelight 22.08.1).
- Discover now inhibits auto-sleep while it is installing apps or updates (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.7).
- Discover no longer freezes on startup if you do it without a network connection (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25.5).
- The System Preferences quick settings page no longer sometimes shows duplicate items in the "Frequently Used" section (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25.5).
- On the Discover Updates page, Flatpak apps or runtimes no longer sometimes show the wrong version number (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26).
- All KDE applications that use KIO for file transfer now benefit from faster copy speeds, especially NFS which can be up to 3-4 times faster (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.98).
The list above is a selection of bugs of all kinds, the ones they have deemed noteworthy. For more information on existing and fixed bugs, visit the links to 15 minute mistakes (currently 46; 5 have been corrected), high priority Plasma bugs y general bugs.
Changes affecting KDE
There have been two changes this week that affect KDE users: Qt 6.5 will allow the color picker to work in Wayland (thanks, Herald Sitter), and turning the brightness down to minimum when using an OLED display with an Intel GPU will no longer turn off the screen until the computer restarts, something that will come in the next version of Intel drivers.
When will all this come
Plasma 5.25.5 will arrive on Tuesday, September 6, Frameworks 5.97 will be available on September 10 and KDE Gear 22.08.1 on September 8. 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.