KDE has made a lot of progress in the last week, and the main beneficiaries will be KRunner, the applications that are based on its technology, and the users who use them. But they have also continued with the work of adding improvements to Plasma 6 that will arrive in a few weeks and correcting bugs, although these corrections will also arrive for Plasma 5.27.8 which will fix more things in the latest version of Plasma 5.
As for several weeks now, the "New Features" section has disappeared to make way for a "Plasma 6." Both are similar, if not equal, with the only difference that the current one only mentions new arrivals that will arrive in the next version of the KDE graphical environment. The only thing clear here is that Plasma 5 will no longer receive anything new other than fixes.
News that will arrive with KDE Plasma 6
- You can now manually configure certain types of search results in KRunner to be high priority and therefore always appear first in the results list (Alexander Lohnau):
- KRunner has also received a lot of performance work (Alexander Lohnau).
- KWin's performance has also been worked on, making it do less unnecessary work by avoiding repainting screen layers that haven't changed at all (Xaver Hugl).
- Plasma performance has also been improved, causing various parts of Plasma and system configuration to run in some cases hundreds of milliseconds faster (Fushan Wen).
- The “refresh” icon from the Breeze icon theme and all other icons that use a similar “circle with arrows” iconography style have been updated with a new, better looking arrow style (Philip Murray):
- The Breeze icon theme now has more colorful weather icons to accommodate the additional weather conditions supported by various weather providers (Alois Spitzbart).
- When supported, KRunner and KRunner-powered searches now allow you to manually initiate “Hybrid Sleep,” which is when the system goes to sleep immediately and then hibernates within a few hours (Natalie Clarius):
- The Display Settings widget is now less intrusive in the System Tray, and only appears in the visible part if you have activated Presentation Mode (Fushan Wen).
- Improved the message “your distribution has shipped Discover without its application backends” to be shorter and more understandable (Nate Graham).
- Explanatory text in placeholder messages that appear in Kirigami-based applications can now be selected and copied with the mouse, and may contain clickable links (Nate Graham).
Improvements in the user's interface
- Preview thumbnails of HDR images displayed in non-HDR mode applications are now converted to the sRGB color space, ensuring that they are actually viewable (Mirco Miranda, kio-extras 23.12)
- Konsole's multithreaded architecture has gained support for putting each process in its own cgroup when using Systemd (Systemd, of course), which causes them to display correctly as children of Konsole in System Monitor (Theodore Wang, Konsole 23.12)
- Holidays in Benin are now supported (Lukas Sommer, KDE Frameworks 5.110).
Correction of minor bugs
- Fixed another Plasma crash when changing Global Themes (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.8).
- The Widget Explorer category filter works again for those using the system in a language other than English (David Redondo, Plasma 5.27.8).
- Fixed one of the most common random crashes in Plasma, usually inexplicable to the user (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, the "Maximized" window placement mode is no longer inappropriately applied to OSDs (David Edmundson, 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 103 bugs.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.8 will arrive on Tuesday September 12th, Frameworks 110 should arrive on September 9th and still no confirmed date on Frameworks 6.0. KDE Gear 23.08.1 will be available on September 14, KDE Gear 23.12 will arrive sometime in December, and Plasma 6 will arrive in the second half of 2023. The exact arrival date of Plasma 6 is also unknown, but there is a page where they will report about the releases of the next version of the KDE desktop. It is almost certain that it will arrive before the end of this 2023.
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.