A little later than usual, but faithful to his weekly appointment, Nate Graham has published a new note with the news that has occurred in the project in which he collaborates during the last seven days. The first thing he has told us about is that KWin has received the initial work to support HDR. If nothing happens, and there is time to fix any issues that show up until the stable version is released, it will come along with KDE plasma 6.0.
With the support for HDR in KWin, color will be better managed under Wayland, and that's the compositor we plan to use in Plasma 6.0 by default. For more details on this, Xaver Hugl, KWin developer, He has written a detailed article. What comes next are the rest of the what's new this week in KDE.
New Features Coming to KDE
- Skanpage now exposes scanner-specific adjustment options such as brightness, contrast, gamma, and color balance (Someone still goes by the pseudonym "John Doe", Skanpage 23.08).
- Konsole now has a new "Monitor for prompt" function that can be used to send a notification once a long-running task is finished (Matan Ziv-Av, Konsole 23.08).
- Kate's LSP client support now supports the GLSL language (Marián Konček, Kate 23.08).
- As with the volume adjustments, you can now hold down Shift while adjusting the brightness to adjust it in 1% increments for finer control (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0).
- File associations app sort priorities can now be applied to other file types in bulk (Marco Rebhan, Plasma 6.0):
Improvements in the user's interface
- Kate's debugger plugin has received several improvements: interactive GDB navigation buttons in its tools view, a configuration window, and a clearer name (Akseli Lahtinen, Kate 23.08).
- For those who were using the fact that Gwenview appears in its own "Open With" menu to open the current image in a new window, there is now a new "Open in New Window" function that does the same thing in a fully supported way ( Eugene Popov, Gwenview 23.08).
- The Magic Lamp window minimization effect now works and looks better with floating panels, hidden panels, and multi-screen layouts (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.27.6).
- When tiling windows, the spacing value you choose now affects the spacing between windows, not just between windows and screen borders (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.27.6).
- The System Preferences Activities page has been ported to QML and given a small visual overhaul in the process (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.0):
- There are now toggles instead of checkboxes for some Plasma widgets, like networking or Bluetooth:
- Now that single-clicking a desktop in the Panorama Effect's desktop bar only changes the desktops with the effect, double-clicking it will now change the desktops and then exit the effect (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0).
- Dolphin no longer shows a free space capacity bar for read-only volumes, because for those it's not very actionable (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.0).
Correction of minor bugs
- When Dolphin is configured to remember open tabs at launch, this now works again after it recently broke during the process of fixing a different bug (Méven Car, Dolphin 23.04.2).
- Gwenview's "Open With" menu always re-opens the specified app instead of a different one, after being bugged by removing Gwenview from its own menu (Gwenview 23.04.2).
- The Properties dialog for files and folders on the desktop now shows its "Details" tab as expected (Méven Car, Dolphin 23.08)
- The "Software Sources" button on the Discover settings page now works (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.6).
- Discover finally shows the versions of the updated Flatpak apps in the correct order, this time for real (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26.7).
- Discover will no longer sometimes display a mysterious error message saying "No metadata URIs for vendor directory" (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.6).
- When using a Global Menu, GTK applications now display their menus correctly right after being launched, without the need for refocusing (Severin von Wnuck, Plasma 5.27.6).
- The "Window to Next/Previous Screen" global actions now resend windows to the correct screens (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27.6).
- When using icon themes with non-monochrome action icons, various icons of various Kirigami-based applications are no longer sometimes inappropriately displayed in black (Alexander Volkov, Frameworks 5.107).
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 136 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.6 will arrive on Tuesday June 20, KDE Frameworks 107 should arrive on the 10th of the same month and there is no confirmed date on Frameworks 6.0. KDE Gear 23.04.2 will be available on June 8, 23.08 will arrive in August and Plasma 6 will arrive in the second half of 2023. Although there is no confirmed date, the release has been prepared. page where they will report about the releases of the next version of Plasma.
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.