Before anyone asks, the background image is from Plasma 5 simply because I don't have access to anything better to represent the main new thing that Nate Graham has covered in his weekly entry on what's new in KDE. Although he has also included several points with the latest changes introduced, he has started his post, entitled "important plumbing work in Plasma 6", with a long text talking about important changes in the next version of the graphical environment in which he collaborates.
Nate says that a lot of work has been done over the last week on some major refactorings of the Plasma widget APIs to give them a more modern feel and make it more difficult to introduce bugs when developing new widgets. As he says, almost everything in Plasma is a widget, so a lot of work is needed to make everything consistent when it launches. plasma 6.
KDE spends a month focused on its widgets
After a month of work, everything seems to be complete. On the user side nothing will be noticeable, but that internal work was necessary, partly also because it has to fit with Qt6 that will start to be used in the second half of 2023.
It is somewhat striking that Graham says that he has had to work most of the time with X11, even though he has been working at Wayland for a long time. This is understandable, as support for Wayland in KDE is still "under construction". For reliability, better X11.
Improvements in the user's interface
- Many significant improvements to the Skanpage UI, including drag-and-drop page reordering, better keyboard shortcuts, and better bug reporting (Someone with the pseudonym "John Doe", Skanpage 23.08).
- Okular no longer bothers when saving a document that has been deleted from disk; he just puts it back as instructed (Nate Graham, Okular 23.08).
- The Dictionary Widget context menu actions are now more relevant and have icons (Laurent Montel, Plasma 6.0):
Regarding the web presence, another page has been published on the official site. It can be accessed from this link, it's KDE for You.
Correction of minor bugs
- KRunner no longer sometimes crashes when trying to calculate certain math expressions, or just typing numbers in general (Max Ramanouski, Plasma 5.27.6).
- The latest change has just been introduced to ensure that Discover always gets the correct version numbers for updatable Flatpak applications (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.27.6).
- When using a fractional scale factor in the Plasma Wayland session, you should no longer see line glitches everywhere (Matthias Dahl, Plasma 5.27.6.).
- Fixed the "Add New Page" dialog in System Monitor so it doesn't break visually when using a language with translated strings longer than English (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27.6).
- In Plasma Wayland session, when adding a second keyboard layout, the keyboard layout's system tray icon now appears immediately (Marco Martin, 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 70 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.6 will arrive on Tuesday June 20th, KDE Frameworks 107 should arrive later today 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. Although there is no confirmed date, there is the 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.