KDE announced today that they almost have Plasma 5.24 ready. Of the bugs that they have to fix before launch, they only have seven left to fix. This does not mean that when we can use the next version of the KDE graphical environment everything will be perfect, but that what they know is not working now they have very little left to fix. New stuff will be discovered soon, but it will be fixed in Plasma 5.24 point releases.
What they are also highlighting a week ago is what they called 15 minute bug, and this week they have corrected four more. Therefore, of those bugs that can appear in the first quarter of an hour after starting the operating system, now the list contains only 83 known ones. One of them will be fixed already in Plasma 5.25.
New Features Coming to KDE
- Konsole now allows to automatically switch to a different profile when connecting to a specific remote server using SSH (Tomaz Canabrava, Konsole 22.04).
- Dolphin now optionally allows you to see the dimensions of images below their icons in icon view (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.04).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- After waking up the system, the desktop is sometimes no longer displayed for a moment before the lock screen appears. This bug is part of the 15 minute list (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25).
- Fixed a variety of issues with song lyrics and metadata in Elisa's "Now Play" view not appearing or updating correctly (Yerrey Dev, Elisa 22.04).
- Gwenview now launches slightly faster, particularly when there are many remote mounts (Nicolas Fella, Gwenview 22.04).
- Plasma no longer sometimes crashes on login when certain applications that display system tray items automatically launch (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.24).
- In the Plasma Wayland session:
- KWin no longer sometimes crashes when dragging screenshots from Spectacle into XWayland applications (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24).
- KWin no longer crashes when unplugging an external monitor that was in "only use external monitor" mode (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24).
- When an app is launched in full screen mode and then converted to a window, it will now be placed in a location that respects the current window's placement mode, instead of always appearing in the top left corner of the screen (Vlad Zahorodnii , Plasma 5.24).
- Screencasting no longer causes the cursor to be visually clipped (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24).
- When an external display is unplugged and plugged back in, XWayland apps that want to launch on the main screen (like many games) no longer get confused and open on the wrong screen (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24).
- Cursor app launch feedback effects now honor the global timeout value that can be set in the System Preferences launch feedback page (David Redondo, Plasma 5.24).
- Keyboard navigation between widgets in the Widget Browser sidebar now works as expected (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.24).
- Disk read/write sensors in System Monitor widgets and the app of the same name no longer report false values the first time they are updated (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.24).
- Shrinking the System Monitor window to a very small size now causes text to wrap correctly instead of overflowing (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.24).
- System Monitor widgets can now be dragged using touch while in Edit Mode (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.24).
- Custom icons that use SVG images referred to by path instead of name reappear correctly in desktop folders and applications (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.91).
- Changing any of the standard shortcuts (for example, to Copy or Paste) in the Shortcuts page of System Preferences now takes effect instantly, rather than causing it to restart first (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.91).
- KDE applications such as Dolphin, which scan network mounts and disks when launched, now launch faster when many Snap applications are installed (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.91).
Improvements in the user's interface
- The Properties dialog no longer shows the Details tab when everything in it is already visible in the General tab (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.04).
- Dolphin's shortcut configuration window now includes the Konsole shortcuts that will be used in the embedded terminal view, so you can reassign them if you wish (Stephan Sahm, Dolphin 22.04).
- Filelight can now be found by searching for a variety of common keywords such as "usage" and "disk space" (Nikolai Weitkemper, Filelight 22.04).
- KRunner now returns better search results for very short search strings of only one or two letters (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24).
- KMenuEdit can now be found in application launchers, KRunner and Discover (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25).
- Menu items in QtWidgets-based applications now also get taller when in Tablet Mode. However, unlike these, QtWidgets applications will have to be restarted first due to technical limitations (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25).
- Task Manager window thumbnails now fade in smoothly instead of appearing abruptly (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25).
- Discover now provides an indication of the number of search results and the number of items in the category being viewed (Aleix Pol González, Plasma 5.25).
- Spacing between system tray icons is now configurable, and automatically changes to its widest setting when in tablet mode (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25).
- The Display Settings page of System Preferences now calls the kdevice's built-in screen "Built-in Screen", instead of assuming it is a laptop and calling it "Laptop Screen" (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25).
When will all this come to your KDE
Plasma 5.24 will arrive on February 8, and KDE Frameworks 5.91 will follow four days later, on February 12. Plasma 5.25 will arrive on June 14. Gear 21.12.2 will be available starting February 3. KDE Gear 22.04 is already scheduled for April 21.
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.