KDE has taken advantage of the last week to correct many of the bugs reported in plasma 6.0. The project was happy with how things had gone. A positive pitch usually. But there is no perfect system or desktop and there is always room for improvement. KDE neon was not so lucky, but the bugs are dropping like flies and this week's note on KDE mainly contains points with corrected errors.
Only one new feature this time, and that is that Ark will be able to open and unarchive self-extracting EXE files. It will arrive in May, coinciding with the May 2024 applications. The rest of the News list It's left with UI tweaks and those patches that will take the user experience one or two steps forward.
Interface improvements coming to KDE
- There is an option that allows you to open an app by clicking inside, and it does so with the first app in the list. Now, in the context menu we will see a text that informs about this (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 24.05).
- Smoothed the floating panel hover/unfloat animation when using a scaling factor, both when using a scaling factor greater than 100% and in general (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.3).
- While in Plasma's global editing mode, it is now possible to click anywhere on a panel to display that panel's own settings dialog, rather than having to point to a small "configure" button just to icons that appear at the end of the panel (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1):
- Entries on the System Preferences Autostart page are now sorted alphabetically, rather than by the order in which they were added (Kristen McWilliam, Plasma 6.1).
- On the Mouse & Touchpad pages of System Preferences it is mentioned that using the middle click emulation setting will increase the click latency by 50 ms, so we can make a more informed decision about whether to use it or not (Wladimir Leuschner, Plasma 6.1).
- Screen selector OSD icons now respect the current accent color (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.1):
Error correction
- Fixed a recent regression that caused Gwenview to crash when trying to play videos (Nicolas Fella, Gwenview 24.02.2).
- Fixed an issue in Okular that caused it to crash when closing a note annotation while the spell checker was activated (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 24.02.2).
- Installing a font in Wayland now works, instead of crashing system settings (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.27.12).
- Fixed a fairly common way in which System Preferences could crash when applying a new window decoration theme (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0.3).
- Plasma no longer crashes when playing certain music videos on Spotify (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.3).
- Fixed a recent regression in System Monitor that caused it to crash when discarding changes after editing a page (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.0.3).
- Fixed a strange issue that could cause certain XWayland windows to continually resize when using certain fractional scaling factors in Qt 6.7 (Yifan Zhu, Plasma 6.0.3).
- Relaxed KWin's requirement in Wayland that XWayland windows can only get the contents of the clipboard when they have keyboard focus, as this was not a requirement in X11 and their implementation was breaking some applications that use XWayland (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0.3).
- Fixed the boot sound, which had stopped playing on boot after all the sound-related changes made for Plasma 6 (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.3).
- Fixed a recent regression in Fitts' Law compliance in Qt on or Qt 11).
- Fixed a recent regression that caused the network speed displayed in the Networks widget to always appear crazy high (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.0.3).
- Fixed a recent regression in multi-monitor setups that caused Task Manager widgets to display tasks on the wrong screen and notifications on X11 to appear in the center of one of the screens, instead of in the correct position (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.3).
- Fixed a recent regression in System Monitor that made it possible to drag pages up when reordering them, but not down (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.0.3).
- Fixed a recent regression in tile colors in System Monitor widgets that use the Color Grid display (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.0.3).
- Improved robustness of the code that migrates custom global shortcuts from the old KHotKeys service to the new KGlobalAccel service (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0.3).
- Fixed an issue with cursor-based camera control in some games in Wayland (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.3).
- Subpixel previews on the Fonts page of System Preferences now display correctly in Wayland (Du Yijie, Plasma 6.0.3).
- The compact global menu button is now disabled when the current application has no global menu, instead of disappearing and causing the panel content to bounce (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0.3).
- Fixed a recent regression that caused the “Total” sensors in System Monitor and its widgets to not work correctly (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.1).
- A group of random Breeze icons that may appear in the system tray that were not changing color correctly when using non-default color schemes now change color correctly (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.1).
- Fixed a source of mysterious random meaningless “Unknown Open Collaboration Service API error.(0)” messages when searching for content in “Get new [thing]” dialogs (Albert Astals Cid, Frameworks 6.1)
- Fixed a recent Qt regression in System Monitor that caused it to crash when trying to open the details sidebar on the Applications page (Nicolas Fella, Qt 6.6.3).
This week a total of 149 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 6.0.3 will arrive on March 26, and Plasma 6.1 will arrive on June 18. Frameworks 6.1 will arrive on April 5, and KDE Gear 24.02.2 is scheduled for April 11. In August we should return to the usual numbering/scheduling of a new major update in 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.