KDE is making a lot of improvements to the user experience on touch devices, and other news this week

It's been a while since Microsoft released the first Surface. It did it to compete with the iPad, which at the time was the most used tablet on the planet, and what they thought was basically to make a touch screen laptop. Apparently and read in many news, it was far from working perfectly well, but I think the idea is good. And, apparently, to KDE he doesn't dislike it either.

And no, it's not that KDE has gone crazy and is thinking about being based on Windows or anything like that. Which are making progress in their tablet mode. Running only on Wayland, when using KDE/Plasma on a convertible, removing the keyboard or putting it in tablet mode will automatically switch the operating system to that mode, and everything will be easier to touch, to what in English is referred to as “touch friendly”. That's the first thing they commented on the note of This Week on KDE.

15 minute bugs resolved

The number remains at 76, since they have solved two and discovered two more (complete list):

• The folder popup that can be opened to display the contents of folders on the desktop is no longer annoyingly two pixels too narrow to display an additional grid cell (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.5).
• When using a Plasma Vault with the GoCryptFS backend, unlocking the Vault now causes it to appear in the Places panel, just like others using the CryFS and EncFS backends (Ivan Čukić, Frameworks 5.93).

New Features Coming to KDE

• Much progress has been made in tablet mode, to which Nate Graham explains:

It's a feature of the Plasma Wayland session where everything becomes more tactile. If you have a convertible laptop, it's activated by flipping the screen back to turn it into – guess what – a tablet. But it will also activate on phones and other non-pointing touch devices, like the Steam Deck, as long as there is no mouse connected (only once you use the Wayland session, of course).

• KWrite now internally uses the same code base as Kate, but just disables a bunch of programmer-centric features. This makes it much more consistent with Kate, easier to maintain, and will have fewer bugs. And now it has tabs (Christoph Cullmann, KWrite 22.08).
• Picture of the Day wallpapers now allow you to preview the image and view image metadata in the settings window. (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25).
• Now, when entering tablet mode, all interactive UI elements (including title bar buttons) that are designed with the Breeze theme become larger and easier to touch (Marco Martin and Arjen Hiemstra , Plasma 5.25).
• You can now manually adjust the spacing between icons in Task Manager for icons only, and when in Tablet Mode, the spacing automatically adjusts to its highest level to improve touchability, just like we do with System Tray icons (Tanbir Jishan and Nate Graham).
• In the Plasma X11 session, all buttons on Wacom ExpressKey Remote devices can now be configured (Someone who goes by the pseudonym “oioi 555”, wacomtablet 3.3.0).

Bug fixes and performance improvements

• When Discover installs updates for packages that have multiple architectures available (for example, 32-bit and 64-bit versions, due to having Steam installed), it now installs updates for all architectures instead of a pseudo-random set of them, which would cause OS issues (Alessandro Astone, Plasma 5.25, but backport to 5.24.5 possible).
• kio-fuse now works within the open/save dialogs of sandboxed applications, which means that you can now use those applications to open and save files to Samba shares and other network locations, for example (Harald Sitter, plasma 5.25).
• Discover now displays description and license information for local packages (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25).
• Discover now displays the correct author name for packages without a specific author set that live in a project group. In practice, this means that a KDE application pool will now list "KDE" as the author (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.25).
• The Bing Photo of the Day wallpaper plugin will now download the 4K versions of images if you have a screen resolution higher than 1080p (Fushan Wen and Yunhe Guo, Plasma 5.25).
• Plasma widget headers reappear as expected when using the "Breeze Light" or "Breeze Dark" Plasma themes which are color coded, instead of the "Breeze" Plasma theme which respects the default color scheme. the application (Martin Framework, Frameworks 5.93).
• Draggable list items in Kirigami-based applications now move much more smoothly, without jerking or glitching (Tranter Madi, Frameworks 5.93).

Improvements in the user's interface

• When using the folder view properties in Dolphin, a variety of locations now use a more relevant view setting: for example, the search view list includes a column showing the actual location of all matches; the trash can list view has columns showing the “original location” and “deletion time”; “Recent Files” and “Recent Locations” searches group items by day; etc. (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.04).
• Tabs in Kate and KWrite no longer span the full width of the window by default, and the full tab bar now only appears after opening a second document, just like in other KDE tabbed applications (Christoph Cullmann, Kate & KWrite 22.08).
• Filelight now has a "go to overview" action that will take you back to the main page (Harald Sitter, Filelight 22.08).
• In the overview effect, a window can now be swiped down to close it, and window close buttons are now always visible instead of only appearing on mouseover (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25).
• Job progress notifications now display a percentage value next to the progress bar for those who prefer to read text over visuals (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25).
• The margin separator widget is now much smaller, but becomes larger and more visually obvious in edit mode (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 5.25).
• The Audio Volume widget no longer shows virtual devices by default, though you can bring them back if you actually use them (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.25).
• The System Preferences Users page no longer shows an email address in the "Email Address" field, because it's 2022 and people generally know what an email address is and how it's structured (David Edmundson, plasma 5.25).
• The media player widget skin now crosses smoothly when it changes, instead of abruptly flickering (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25).
• All Plasma widgets that display placeholder messages when empty now also display icons in addition to text (Fushan Wen and Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25).
• The Display Settings page of System Preferences can now say exactly what setting a display to “Primary” does (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25).
• The sheet "What is the risk of proprietary software?" Discover now opens by clicking a more conventional button, rather than a link that might make you think you're opening a web browser (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25).
• When creating a new file from Dolphin, the desktop, or anything else that uses the standard "create new file" functionality, the preselected part of the filename no longer includes the extension (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.93).

When will this all come to KDE?

Plasma 5.24.5 will arrive on May 3, and Frameworks 93 will be available from April 9. Plasma 5.25 will arrive as early as June 14, and KDE Gear 22.04 will land with new features on April 21. KDE Gear 22.08 does not yet have an official scheduled date.

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.