KDE has christened Plasma 5.23 the Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition. This week's news

The project KDE will be 25 years old. I'm not going to say something like I've known them since (I didn't even have my own computer), but I can say that it has rained a lot in these two and a half decades. Just 5 years ago it was so unstable that many of us decided to stay in MATE or even Unity, but now things work much better and many of us choose the K team software.

This week, Nate Graham has started His article about news that will come to KDE talking about this date, that and that Plasma 5.23 has been baptized as Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition. It will arrive with news as a new theme, and here are some others, as they continue to work for the next big release.

New Features Coming to KDE

• Elisa now allows you to optionally use the 'favorite / not favorite' rating style, where we mark songs as favorites instead of giving them a specific number of stars (Nate Graham, Elisa 21.12).
• Now we can scroll with the mouse wheel or the touchpad over the Plasma calendar view to change the month that is displayed (Tanbir Jishan, Frameworks 5.88).

Bug fixes and performance improvements

• Okular no longer crashes when trying to display a Markdown file that includes an image that does not have its alt text (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 21.08.2).
• Okular no longer crashes when opening a PDF with a malformed date value (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 21.08.3).
• When using the Dolphin filter function in the details view, folders that do not have any files that match the filter are no longer displayed (Eduardo Cruz, Dolphin 21.12).
• In Plasma Wayland:
  • KWin no longer crashes when the computer wakes up but all screens have been marked as disabled; instead it now enables the first connected but disabled display so there is at least one display that can display stuff. (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.23).
  • XWayland applications no longer sometimes disappear when switching virtual desktop (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23).
  • Text copied from Plasma itself (for example, from the KRunner search field) now appears on the global clipboard as expected. This fixes the last major Wayland clipboard problem KDE was aware of. (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23).
  • Closing an application with a maximized window and reopening it now causes its window to open on the screen with the cursor over it, instead of always appearing on the leftmost screen (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.23).
  • The default Meta + Q shortcut for switching activities now always works (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.23).
• Right-clicking on desktop icons no longer displays the menu on the wrong screen of a multiscreen setup (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23).
• Discover no longer sometimes shows the wrong installed version for Flatpak applications and runtimes with available updates (Aleix Pol González, Plasma 5.23).
• Pressing enter after entering a number in the spinbox to choose the thickness of a Plasma panel now makes the change take effect as expected (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.23).
• The keyboard shortcuts Alt + O and Ctrl + Enter / Return now work to close the clipboard item editing window (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.23).
• Right click on colors now works in expanded view of Color Picker widget (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.23).
• Screen edge highlighting now appears more reliably in certain situations (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.23).
• Task Manager tooltips that display multimedia controls no longer sometimes overlap a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.23 with Frameworks 5.88).
• Dolphin and Plasma and other applications no longer crash when undoing a file copy (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.87).
• Copying files from FAT32 formatted volumes no longer fails sometimes and hangs forever (Oliver Freyermuth, Frameworks 5.88).
• The "B" of the "Background Color" label in the Gwenview status bar is no longer partially cut off (Julius Zint, Frameworks 5.88).
• All Plasma applets should be a bit more agile and use less memory thanks to the recent revision of the backend code (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.88).
• Color icons on colored backgrounds in KDE applications should now be intelligently recolored to never have the same color as the background (Aleix Pol González, Frameworks 5.88).
• Plasma now saves any changes we have made in edit mode as soon as we exit that mode, so the changes will be preserved if Plasma crashes later (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.88).
• The 'Trash is full' error message is now better worded and no longer overflows in Dolphin (Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.88).

Improvements in the user's interface

• Arca's preview window no longer shows a redundant close button at the bottom of the window (Eugene Popov, Arca 21.12).
• Left-clicking an icon on the desktop while selecting multiple icons now deselects icons that were not clicked after opening the one that was clicked (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.23).
• In Plasma Wayland session with in a multi-screen setup, the cursor now appears at the login in the center of the screen that is closest to being in the center of the layout (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23).
• The focus effect for buttons, text fields, check boxes, radio buttons, comboboxes and spinboxes has been expanded into a 'focus ring' which should be much easier to visually distinguish at a glance (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.24 ).
• The System Preferences Formats page has been rewritten in QtQuick, which fixes many issues related to the old-fashioned user interface and gets you started on a large-scale review of how locales are presented and adjusted, what which will probably include merging the Languages ​​page into this one so that the process of changing the system language is ultimately easy, obvious and reliable (Han Young, Plasma 5.24).
• The Night Color page of System Preferences now supports the "Highlight Changed Settings" function (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.24).
• When the Weather applet is added to the panel or the built-in one is activated in the System Tray, its pop-up now asks to be configured, rather than letting us find out that this is necessary (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.24).
• Discover's update page now has a lighter style, showing only the "pills" on the right hand side for items that are in progress; otherwise, the size text only appears floating to the right side of the element (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24).
• The basic UI elements in Plasma now follow the same recently deployed style for KDE applications, which also improves the visibility of the focus effect, particularly for sliders and checkboxes (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.87) .
• By default, KTextEditor-based applications like KWrite, Kate, and KDevelop now allow you to enclose text in parentheses or brackets by selecting the text and typing the opening character of the parenthesis / bracket / etc. (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.88).
• Systray applets with expandable list items are now easier to use with the keyboard: you can activate an item's default button with the Return / Enter key, expand it with the space bar, collapse it with the Escape key, and display your context menu (if present) using the Menu key on your keyboard, if you have one (Bharadwaj Raju, Frameworks 5.88).
• Grid items on System Preferences Grid view pages now visually indicate when they have keyboard focus (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.88).

When will this all come to KDE?

"Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition" (5.23) is coming October 14. KDE Gear 21.08.3 will be released on November 11, and KDE Gear 21.12 on December 9. KDE Frameworks 5.87 will be released today October 9, and 5.88 on November 13. Plasma 5.24 still has no scheduled date.

To enjoy all this as soon as possible we have to add the repository backports from KDE or use an operating system with special repositories like Kde neon or any distribution whose development model is Rolling Release, although the latter usually take a little longer than the KDE system.