La week of August 27 to September 3 en KDE He gave us a preview of many new features coming with Plasma 5.26. As usual, after putting so much meat on the grill it's time to cook it right, and that's what it looks like they'll be doing between now and the stable release of the next major Plasma update. Not a lot of new stuff has been released today, but work is continuing to refine things.
This week's KDE article is simply titled "Preparing Plasma 5.26". It's not very long, which may simply mean that a lot of the work done in the last seven days has to do with correct bugs, and Nate Graham already said weeks ago that only the important ones would be published; the rest are no longer in the This Week in KDE articles.
New Features Coming to KDE
- In Plasma Wayland session touch mode, you can now force Maliit's virtual keyboard to appear even though it doesn't appear automatically (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26).
- In the System Monitor and in the Plasma widgets of the same name, you can now check the minimum, maximum and average temperature and frequency sensors of your CPU (Alessio Bonfiglio, Plasma 5.26).
Improvements in the user's interface
- Gwenview can now open GIMP .xcf files (Nicolas Fella, Gwenview 22.08.1).
- Elisa now displays a user-friendly message explaining what didn't work when dragging and dropping non-audio files onto it (Bharadwaj Raju, Elisa 22.12).
- On Kickoff, Flatpak apps now display the “Uninstall or Manage Plugins” menu item in their context menus (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.7).
- Info Center pages now have a visually obvious “Copy to Clipboard” button that can be used to copy all text to the clipboard (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26).
- Night Color now has a simpler interface for turning it on and off: the "off" state is now part of the combo box for choosing the activation time, instead of being a second checkbox (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.26).
- The user switcher widget no longer has a confusing "Exit" button that shuts down the computer; it has been replaced by an «Exit» button that closes the session (Aleix Pol González, Plasma 5.26).
Important bug fixes
- Connecting to Windows Samba shares now works when using samba-libs 4.16 or higher (Harald Sitter, kio-extras 22.08.2).
- Fixed another common source of KWin crashes in Plasma Wayland session when connecting or disconnecting screens (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.5).
- KWin no longer crashes when waking up from sleep with the "KDE Snap Assist" script active (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26).
- KRunner code is no longer overridable by 5.26rd party Plasma themes, so they can no longer break it in a way that it can't be opened, which, yes, was totally something that happened sometimes (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma XNUMX).
- KWin's crossfade effect is back, which means you'll see a nice crossfade again when maximizing and unmaximizing windows, and when moving between panel tooltips (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26).
- Applications and windows in the Task Manager are now much more resistant to being accidentally dragged when clicking on them is intended (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, the panel tooltips morph again using the KWin Morphing Popups effect (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.99).
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. As for the first one, there are 45 left to correct.
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.26 will arrive next Tuesday, October 11, Frameworks 5.99 will be available on October 8 and KDE Gear 22.08.2 on October 13. 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.