This week, the project that likes the letter K has released KDE Gear 22.04.2, so between the news that they would present us today Saturday some would have been expected for 22.04.3. Well no, nothing new has been mentioned in the form of a fix for KDE Gear 22.04.3. Yes, many have been mentioned, practically almost all of them, which will arrive from the hand of Plasma 5.25 and Plasma 5.26, the first already next Tuesday, June 14.
They have also told us about the 15 minute bug, something they actually do at the beginning of their articles. They are bugs that usually appear soon and with high probability, and are, according to their developers, what make KDE famous. This week one has been added and two have been fixed, so the list of such bugs has dropped from 65 to 64. They haven't said which bugs have been fixed.
How to Live Aligned with new feature, this week they only talked about one coming in Plasma 5.26: Plasma will support wallpapers with different images displayed when using a light color scheme versus a dark color scheme. Light and dark versions of your wallpapers will be included in future versions of Plasma.
User interface improvements coming soon to KDE
- Ark now checks that there will be enough free space in the location when trying to unarchive something before it starts (Tomaz Canabrava, Ark 22.08).
- When searching in KRunner, Kickoff, Overview, or any other KRunner-powered search fields, matching System Preferences pages no longer display as far down the list (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25).
- Windows can now be dragged between screens in the Overview and Present Windows effects (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25).
- Hovering over the Media Controller widget icon now changes the volume of the media playing app in steps of 5%, not 3%, so it now matches the default step size when changing the volume of the whole system. Also, like the system volume, the step size is configurable (Oliver Beard, Plasma 5.26).
- Breeze styled buttons no longer have a gradient when not hovered over, making them look a bit lighter and stand out more from the background of the page (Someone who wishes to remain anonymous, Plasma 5.26) .
- The common "Keyboard Shortcuts" dialog you'll see in many applications and in System Preferences no longer displays empty "Global Shortcuts" columns when the application doesn't set any global shortcuts, or empty "Local Shortcuts" columns when only set global shortcuts (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.95).
- Analog Clock tickmarks and digits now respect their accent color, and the entire Analog Clock face also respects the color scheme (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 5.96).
- The animated transition when the wallpaper changes from one image to another now respects the global animation duration setting (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26).
- In all QtQuick-based software, views in which one thing happens to another now respect the global animation duration setting (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.96).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- Thumbnail previews of a folder's contents are generated again as expected, instead of only after you have navigated to the folder (Martin TH Sandsmark, Dolphin 22.08).
- Automount is back to off by default as expected (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.25).
- SDDM login screen themes downloaded via the “Get New [Thing]” download window now appear in the System Preferences Login Screen page immediately, rather than only after closing it and reopen it (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.6).
- Touch mode auto-detection now ignores fake input devices, so it can no longer crash when running an app that creates such fake input devices (Alexander Volkov, Plasma 5.24.6).
- Repeatedly mounting and unmounting a disk no longer makes your action list in the "Disks and Devices" widget get longer and longer and accumulate blank entries (Ivan Ratijas, Plasma 5.25).
- It is no longer possible to undo text removal in Plasma password input fields, which increases security a bit (Derek Christ, Frameworks 5.95 and Plasma 5.26).
- When you use the "Upload" action in Dolphin, the folder we just came from is highlighted again (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.95).
- The shortcuts dialog again displays accurate information about shortcut conflicts (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.96).
When will all this come
Plasma 5.25 will arrive next Tuesday, June 14, Frameworks 5.95 will be available later today and 5.96 will be available on July 9th. KDE Gear 22.08 does not yet have an official scheduled date, but it is known that it will arrive in August. Plasma 5.24.6 will arrive on July 5, and Plasma 5.26 will be available from October 11.
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.