We are already in the month in which KDE will give us what they have called the KDE 6 Mega-Release. It will be on Wednesday, February 28, when they will release Plasma 6, Frameworks 6 and the February 2024 applications in the form of a stable version, and they will also recommend that all distributions start using Qt6. The world will not stop there, and after that event progress will continue and Plasma 6.1, Frameworks 6.1 and the May 2024 applications will land.
It is not surprising that progress continues to be made regarding Wayland. It is something that has almost always appeared in Nate Graham's weekend notes, and, although it may be tiring to read about it, it is necessary that work be done in this area. What comes next is the list with news that have taken place during the last seven days.
KDE interface improvements
- When you drag a file in your Plasma Wayland session and it passes over another window on the way to its final destination, the window it passes over only rises to the top when you stop moving the cursor for one second full, instead of the previous value of a quarter of a second (Xaver Hugl).
- Panels in “Auto Hide” mode (or the new “Dodge Windows” mode) that are hidden are no longer displayed inappropriately when the system wakes up or changes display settings (Vlad Zahorodnii).
- A few more improvements have been made to the ranking of KRunner search results (Alexander Lohnau).
- Removed the gray groove on the scroll bar tracks that appears when hovering the mouse (Akseli Lahtinen):
- When using the Breeze Dark style or color scheme, widget pop-ups no longer have a whitish glow when opened (Niccolò Venerandi).
- Clipboard and keyboard prompt systray applets now hide completely when they have nothing to show, instead of appearing in the expanded part of the systray and displaying a generic "nothing to see" message here, hurr hurr” when clicking (Jin Liu).
- The colors and line weights of single-pixel separators and outlines across all Breeze-themes KDE software are consistent, as many previously used subtly different colors and line weights (Akseli Lahtinen and Marco Martin).
Error correction
- It is no longer possible to block Plasma by giving a virtual desktop an absurdly long name (Vlad Zahorodnii).
- It is now possible to use Alt+PrintScreen as a key combination for global shortcuts (Yifan Zhu).
- System Monitor “Import Page” functionality works again (Arjen Hiemstra).
- The tooltips Plasma now get their visual style from the active Plasma style Tooltip SVG, instead of their Dialog SVG, which was a bit weird (David Edmundson).
- Various fixes and improvements have been made to windows that use fractional scaling factors (Akseli Lahtinen and Kai Uwe Broulik).
- With the Breeze app style, rare menu items with multiple lines of text are now displayed correctly (Ilya Bizayev).
- The kinfo command line program now correctly reports the graphics platform, i.e. X11 or Wayland (Harald Sitter).
In total, 149 bugs have been fixed this week.
Post-Mega-Launch News
- Spectacle's text tool now allows you to insert line breaks and wrap text (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05).
- KCalc now uses a more modern style without frames (Carl Schwan, KCalc 24.05):
- The Weather widget now shows the probability of precipitation for all data providers except the BBC, which does not provide this information (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.1):
- When there is more than one audio input or output device, the name of each one displayed in the system tray widget is now much more readable and understandable, and does not include weird technical text that often made no sense ( Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.1):
- Notifications showing file transfer or download jobs now have a clearer button layout (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.1):
- When the logout screen is activated by invoking a specific action (e.g. “Shut Down”), it will now act more like a confirmation screen and will only show that action plus a cancel button (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.).
- Right-clicking on a panel now brings up a menu that says “Show panel settings,” which is clearer than the old “Enter editing mode” (Marco Martín).
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.11 and Frameworks 115 will arrive this month. Plasma 28, KDE Frameworks 2024 and KDE Gear 6 will arrive on February 6, 24.02.0. The next major update of the applications will land in May, and the next one will probably return to the usual schedule of April-August-December.
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.