KDE, or more specifically Nate Graham, has published a new note about what has happened in the last week in your world. In it, he talks about improvements in the multi-monitor section, saying that, as with Wayland, by focusing on it, people have started using it, which has made the user experience not so good but, in general, be a positive thing, because reported bugs will help improve things. Needless to say, he mentions that Wayland is now robust, and I disagree; It cannot be if there are many things, even if they are from third-party software, that do not work well.
For everything else, the bug fixing section of some importance calls my attention: there are many bugs that have been fixed to plasma 5.27.2, which may mean that 5.27 hasn't arrived in good shape or it did, and things are being improved further. In any case, it is an LTS version, and what those of us who use KDE will have for about eight months.
As new features, this week we have only been told that using the context menu item present in Dolphin and on the desktop, now you can set an image to be the wallpaper also for the lock screen, or for the desktop and the lock screen at the same time. It is a novelty that will come from the hand of Julius Zint in Plasma 6.0, and honestly, having had some problems related to this in the past, a server appreciates this novelty.
User interface improvements coming to KDE
- Kate and KWrite now internally save their set of open documents shortly after opening them, so if either app crashes or dies due to memory pressure, open documents will no longer be lost when we open it again (Waqar Ahmed, Kate & KWrite 23.04).
- Okular now zooms smoothly instead of in steps when Ctrl+scrolling using a touchpad or high-resolution scroll wheel (Friso Smit, Okular 23.04).
- When setting up a new Plasma system, applications that are pinned to the Task Manager by default in Plasma (Discover, System Settings, Dolphin, and a web browser), but are not installed by default on the operating system you are using, they will now simply be ignored, instead of staying visible with a broken icon and doing nothing when clicked (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.2.).
- The Welcome Center has received a visual overhaul to bring it more in line with other KDE applications, so now its interactive buttons appear in a footer and there are dots showing all pages and which page is active (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.0 ):
- Discover's app page has received another visual upgrade, now making better use of space and looking better overall (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0):
- The flatpak permissions page in System Preferences now includes a search field for the list of applications and a header for application details (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.0):
Correction of minor bugs
- Fixed a recent regression that caused line artifacts to appear around panels when using a fractional scale factor in the Plasma Wayland session (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.27.2).
- Fixed a case where KWin could crash in the Plasma Wayland session while playing a video in VLC (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.27.2).
- Fixed a case where KWin could crash when exiting a Plasma Wayland session and leave you hanging (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.27.2).
- When using the recent version 1.8.11 or later of the fwupd library, Discover will now always start correctly (Adam Williamson, Plasma 5.27.2).
- Fixed a recent regression that could cause powerdevil to crash with certain multiscreen setups, breaking power management (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.2).
- Fixed a case where System Preferences could crash when applying or reverting screen layout changes (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.27.2).
- Fixed a recent major regression in how Aurorae window themes were drawn in the Plasma Wayland session (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27.2).
- Fixed a semi-recent regression in the Plasma Wayland session that allowed the cursor to briefly go 1 pixel beyond the screen at the bottom and right edges of the screen, somewhat breaking Fitts Law and causing items to Hover-triggered UI blocks at the edges of the screen will flicker (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.2).
- Fixed an issue in the Plasma Wayland session where the desktop size was subtly incorrectly calculated when using a fractional scaling factor, causing multiple one-pixel visual and functional glitches all over the place (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27.2).
- Discover no longer shows complete nonsense for most apps provided by distro-repos in the "Distributed by:" field on app pages (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27.2).
- The semi-new QML version of the Windows Present effect now works correctly with the keyboard when invoked in its mode that only shows the windows of a specific app, no longer allowing to invisibly focus windows of other apps as well (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.27.2 ).
- When using a fractional scale factor in the Plasma Wayland session, the cursor now displays correctly in applications using XWayland (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.2).
- Multi-display arrays consisting of displays from the same vendor that differ only by the last character of their serial numbers (imagine a large company buying monitors in bulk) will no longer be mixed up on login (David Redondo, Plasma 5.27.2).
- Fixed a semi-recent regression in the Plasma Wayland session that could cause the Baloo file indexing service to crash frequently (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.104).
- When getting new plugins via the Get New [Thing] dialog, the sheet that allows you to choose which thing to get if there is more than one is now properly scrollable if it doesn't fit in the view (Ivan Tkachenko, Framework 5.104).
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 152 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.2 will arrive on February 28, KDE Frameworks 104 should land on March 4, and there is no news on Frameworks 6.0. KDE Gear 22.12.3 will arrive on March 2, and 23.04 is planned for an April 20 release.
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.