This week, KDE has announced that they are already going for the 6 for real. They will no longer make changes that are based on Qt5, and now everything they do will be based on Qt6. In addition, they are starting to fully focus on Plasma 6.0, the next version of their graphical environment that, together with Qt6 and Frameworks 6, will make the leap significant. And terrifying, as KDE neon said on Twitter this week.
More than terrifying, I would say that what they mean is exciting, but the truth is that big changes can make us nervous. While going up to 5 seems to have worked, it wasn't so good when they went up to 4, and one server tried Plasma 4.x thinking that all of KDE was a complete mess, at least on my hardware at the time. Explained all this, let's go with the News list that have been presented to us this week.
As new functions we only have an option to change the visual intensity of the border line drawn in the windows decorated by Breeze, or eliminate them completely. It is something that is being prepared for Plasma 6.0, but they could backport to Plasma 5.27. It is a novelty that Akseli Lahtinen has introduced.
User interface improvements coming to KDE
- The new portal-based "Open With" dialog is no longer used by non-Portal applications; they now have the old dialogue back (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27.3).
- Bound buttons in Breeze-themed GTK apps like Rhythmbox now look better (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27.3):
- Notifications in the history popup are now sorted chronologically, rather than by some hard-to-understand combination of type and urgency (Joshua Goins, Plasma 6.0).
- The way KDE applications window sizes and positions are remembered for multi-screen setups is now fundamentally more robust, so we should see fewer instances of incorrectly sized and positioned windows when using multiple screens, especially when they change specific screens (Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.104).
- It is now possible to directly delete items that are already in the trash (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.104).
Correction of minor bugs
- When using an NVIDIA graphics card, after rebooting or waking the system from sleep, external displays are no longer often disabled inappropriately, and also icons and text throughout Plasma are no longer sometimes missing (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27.2 .XNUMX).
- Fixed a case where KWin could crash when changing window decoration themes (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.27.2).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, when the clipboard history has been set to a single item, it is now possible to copy text with a single copy action, not two (David Redondo, Plasma 5.27.3).
- Desktop icons in the active activity should no longer rearrange inappropriately when the set of connected displays changes. However, during the research process they discovered that the code to store the desktop file position is inherently problematic and needs a fundamental rewrite, just like they did for the multi-screen layout in Plasma 5.27. This will be done for Plasma 6.0, and hopefully Plasma's long history of being bad at remembering desktop icon positions is just that, history (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.27.3).
- Gwenview now only registers its MPRIS interface when it's doing something (eg playing a slideshow) that is controllable via MPRIS, which should prevent it from sometimes hijacking its global media playback shortcuts while it's running normally ( Joshua Goins, Gwenview 23.04).
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 115 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.3 It's coming on March 14, KDE Frameworks 104 should land later today, and there's no news on Frameworks 6.0. KDE Gear 23.04 is planned to be released on April 20.
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.