Although there is still time, the countdown began when KDE announced the approximate release date of Plasma 6. It will arrive in 2024, so as not to step on each other's fingers, and for the same reason they have delayed the launch of the KDE Gear from December to next February. You will have to be patient, but the wait will be worth it because we will get many new functions and fewer bugs than would be expected after a leap of this size. Or so the theory goes.
In the following list of new features we find several changes that will improve the user experience. For example, they have made the cursor more responsive in Wayland sessions. Any improvement is welcome, but I've been using Wayland for months and I haven't noticed any problems with the cursor. In the next News list Bugs have also been fixed that will arrive with Plasma 5.27.9.
News and corrections coming to KDE Plasma 6
- Even more improvements have been made to cursor responsiveness for the Plasma Wayland session. The cursor is actually very sensitive now (Xaver Hugl).
- This work has also substantially improved overall latency, especially for gaming (Xaver Hugl).
- Kickoff now has an option to move its sidebar to the other side of the main view (Forest Ix).
- The default keyboard shortcut for opening the Activity Switcher has been changed to Meta+A, so that your previous shortcut Meta+Tab can be used by something else they'll be announcing soon (Niccolò Venerandi).
- When you have Powerdevil configured to hibernate after a sleep period, invoking sleep using KRunner now respects that preference and hibernates at the appropriate time (Natalie Clarius).
- The launch time of KDE applications based on Plasma and QtQuick has been accelerated by loading the mobile text editing toolbar on demand, instead of always (Fushan Wen,).
- NFS drives mounted in fstab no longer produce duplicate items in the Places panel of various KDE applications and in the open/save dialog (Méven Car).
- Discover now displays release data for SteamOS system updates in a more beautiful and understandable way (Jeremy Whiting).
- Discover's About page now uses the new, more attractive FormCard style (Carl Schwan):
- A variety of QtWidgets-based dialog windows that have menu or tool bars now use the common unified header style used by KDE (Carl Schwan) application windows:
- Created a new standard component: Kirigami.InlineViewHeader, and ported a bunch of list and grid views to use it (Nate Graham):
- The “Update your distro now” notification message is no longer radioactive (Oliver Beard).
Correction of minor bugs
- Spectacle now takes screenshots of the Rectangular Region correctly when using any screen scaling factor less than 100% (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.02.0).
- Fixed a case where the touchpad daemon could crash randomly (Gabriel Souza Franco and Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.8).
- Fixed a rare case where KWin would crash in the Plasma Wayland session when waking up from sleep (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.9).
- The Alt+Tab window switcher is now fully accessible through the standard Orca screen reader in the Plasma Wayland session (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.9)
- When updating many Flatpak applications at the same time, Discover can no longer exhaust the set of available file handles on the system and then crash (Plasma 5.27.9)
- Automatically turning off the keyboard backlight when using the battery now works, if configured to do so (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0).
- Fixed a bug that could cause applications using KIO to crash when trying to overwrite a file under certain circumstances (Kevin Ottens, Frameworks 5.111).
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 119 bugs.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.9 will arrive on Tuesday, October 17 if there is no change of plans, Frameworks 111 will arrive on October 13 and there is still no confirmed date about Frameworks 6.0. KDE Gear 24.02 will arrive sometime in February, the same month that Plasma 6 will land. The exact arrival date is not known, but there is a page where they will report about the releases of the next version of the KDE desktop.
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.