KDE has spent this week fixing bugs, which has resulted in the list of open issues only increasing by 2. This is in contrast to the few items they have included in the bug fix section of some importance, and also to the total number of bugs fixed, which doesn't really give that impression. But who am I to doubt the words of Nate Graham.
Where it is noticeable that they have advanced has been in the development of Plasma 6, with a list of novelties that amounts to the same 6 that we see now, wherever we look. As for other news not related to the next version of the KDE graphical environment, all project applications now support the QOI image format.
In a non-KDE but KDE-affecting way, the InputCapture portal has been integrated into the xdg-desktop-portal, offering Wayland support for applications like Barrier and Input Leap that need to be able to remotely control key and pointer input. Support for the KDE Portal Extension hasn't been implemented yet, but that's coming too.
News that will arrive with KDE Plasma 6
- More 1st party widgets and System Tray icons are now always monochrome and symbolic no matter how thick the Panel they live on, even if there are colored icons in large sizes. This includes the Trash, Folder and Minimize All widgets and the KTeaTime System Tray icon ( Nate Graham).
- Updated the layout and visual effects of the per-app notification settings page in System Preferences (Nate Graham):
- When reverting to software rendering, the Icon widget's text label now has a rounded black rectangular background, just like the desktop icons (Mike Noe, link).
- New with a Spanish accent: Bluetooth-based Internet connections are now distinguished by a new icon (Manuel Jesús de la Fuente and Ismael Asensio):
- The "Open" buttons on the toolbar of many QtWidgets-based KDE applications have now grown a small arrow-shaped button on the side that provides quick access to recent documents (Kai Uwe Broulik):
- In all QtQuick-based KDE software, small icons rendered with Kirigami.Icon will no longer automatically and inappropriately mask black, losing all color; this is now purely an option, which fixes a lot of bugs (Nate Graham).
Improvements in the user's interface
- Two-finger zoom gestures in Okular now zoom to the midpoint between fingers, as expected (Nicolas Fella, Okular 23.12).
- In Elisa, clicking on a sidebar item now takes you directly to that, even if you were already on a child page of the thing you clicked on (Jack Hill, Elisa 23.12).
- Kolourpaint now allows much more zooming (Albert Astals Cid, Kolourpaint 23.12).
Correction of minor bugs
- Spectacle no longer crashes when changing display settings while it is running (Albert Astals Cid, Spectacle 23.08.1).
- Fixed a rare bug that could cause Plasma to crash when some widgets updated their content while their popups were open (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.8).
- Pressing the Meta key to open and close the Kickoff application launcher no longer steals the focus of the window that it did before (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.7.1).
- KDESU works again on Kubuntu (Fabian Vogt, Frameworks 5.110).
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 98 bugs.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.8 will arrive on Tuesday 12th September, Frameworks 109 should arrive later today, 110 on 9th September and still no confirmed date on Frameworks 6.0. KDE Gear 23.08 will be available on August 24, KDE Gear 23.12 will arrive sometime in December, and Plasma 6 will arrive in the second half of 2023. The exact arrival date of Plasma 6 is also unknown, but there is a page where they will report about the releases of the next version of the KDE desktop. It is almost certain that it will arrive before the end of this 2023.
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.