In these months it is more than likely that we will continue to learn of many news in KDE, but I expect the number to drop considerably. This year they will be moving up to Plasma 6, Frameworks 6 and Qt6, and they can't waste much time on anything other than preparing for that moment. Still, they also can't afford to find bugs in the software we currently have at hand and continue to fix bugs in the latest version of Plasma.
Most of the list of bug fixes will arrive in plasma 5.27.6. For those who have been confused, yes, it will be point-six because it is an LTS version, we will also see point-seven and maybe more. It will have to be the different distributions that decide whether to go up to the six as soon as they are available or not, and I think that few will do it in the first days. In addition to KDE neon, some Rolling Release, but not much else.
In the new functions section, this week they have only advanced one, that the Okular digital signature workflow has been improved, and now offers the opportunity to add various metadata such as "reason" and "location" to the signature, and also to optionally add a background image behind it. It is a novelty that bears the signature of Sune Vuorela and will arrive in Okular 23.08.
User interface improvements coming to KDE
- You can now double-click a tab in Dolphin to create a duplicate of it (Méven Car, Dolphin 23.08. Link)
- When Elisa switches an album art from one image to another, it is now smoother and better looking, with no flickering or visual glare (Fushan Wen, Elisa 23.08. Link)
- Okular now shows the “Digitally Sign” action at the top level of its hamburger menu, for quicker access (Nate Graham, Okular 23.08. Link):
- All System Monitor dialogs have been adapted to use a new Kirigami dialog component, which looks better and fixes some layout issues (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0):
- Improved responsiveness when hovering over items in the Kickoff category list (Derek Christ, Plasma 6.0).
- Folder entries in the System Preferences file search page now show their actual icons (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.0).
- After being notified of a filename conflict in the save dialog, keyboard focus now immediately returns to the filename field so that the name can be changed to something else (Oliver Beard, Frameworks 5.107).
Correction of minor bugs
- In Plasma Wayland session, fixed a source of Powerdevil crashes when screens are sleeping (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.6).
- Fixed a source of excessive CPU usage in Plasma caused by window movement (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.6).
- In the Plasma wayland session, fixed some cursor handling bugs that could cause cursors to look incorrect in XWayland applications (Severin von Wnuck, Plasma 5.27.6).
- System Preferences 'Login Screen (SDDM)' page shows UI errors again (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27.6).
- Checking for updates in the PyCharm app no longer causes KWin to crash (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0).
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 99 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.6 will arrive on Tuesday June 20, KDE Frameworks 107 arrived on Saturday and there is no confirmed date on Frameworks 6.0. Although nothing has been mentioned today, KDE Gear 23.04.3 will be available on July 6, 23.08 will arrive in August, and Plasma 6 will arrive in the second half of 2023. There is still no official date confirmed, but there is a page where they will report about the releases of the next version of Plasma.
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.