Technically it hasn't been KDE who made this little joke but Nate Graham from KDE. Phoronix is a relevant medium in the world of free software, and, probably because many of its headlines are similar, the developer has mentioned that at this point, it's almost a joke at Phoronix's expense, but that this time “we actually have more Wayland corrections. From what I understand, the joke is that in the middle of Michael Larabel it is said every week that changes have been introduced in Wayland, more or less.
But joking aside, they have introduced changes at a point where it is needed. Just as GNOME uses Wayland By default on almost all hardware configurations and it works fine, KDE has a lot of problems to fix, less in its software and more when it comes to 5.27.4rd party software or GTK. In any case, they are moving forward, and some of those improvements will arrive in Plasma XNUMX.
Interface improvements coming to KDE
- The Ark splash screen now offers more functionality when opened directly, without being opened from a file, making it look a bit more like Kate (Eugene Popov, Ark 23.04):
- Made some UI improvements to Elisa, such as showing an "Exit" menu item in the hamburger menu when using the systray icon feature, correctly reverting to the previous window state on exit from full screen mode and reset the playback position slider to the beginning when the playlist is manually cleared (Nikita Karpei and Nate Graham, Elisa 23.04).
- Okular's default toolbar layout has been tweaked a bit, now including the "View Mode" menu by default and also showing the zoom and view buttons on the left side, with the tools on the right side (Nate Graham, Okular 23.04):
- When actions like "Fix it for me!" in the Samba sharing wizard, an appropriate error message is now displayed explaining what went wrong (Nate Graham, kdenetwork-filesharing 23.08).
- Plasma now exposes global actions for "Restart" and "Shutdown" so you can add keyboard shortcuts to activate them. There were already “unconfirmed” versions of these actions, but these new ones will ask for confirmation first (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0).
- When importing VPN configurations, errors are now displayed in the UI so we can figure out what went wrong and maybe fix it ourselves (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.27.3).
- When downloading new Flatpak apps, Discover now correctly reports the "Downloading" status (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.4).
- If our keyboard has an Emoji key, pressing it now opens the Emoji selection window (Konrad Borowski, Plasma 5.27.4).
- The Info Center has adopted a flat sidebar structure, so pages no longer live in subcategories. This should make everything easier and faster to access (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.0. Link):
- Synchronizing Plasma settings with SDDM now also synchronizes cursor size (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0).
- The Filelight icon for the third-party GParted application is no longer misused in the Breeze icon theme (Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.105).
Correction of minor bugs
- Fixed a source of System Preferences crashes when importing VPN configuration files (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.27.3).
- Fixed another source of clipboard-related crashes in Plasma (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.4).
- Significantly improved robustness of display arrays when using a multi-monitor setup that includes monitors with identical EDID values (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.3).
- Significantly improved the robustness of Plasma content mapping to screens when using multi-monitor setups (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27.3).
- Fixed how GTK apps scale themselves in Plasma Wayland session when using multiple displays with different physical DPI values (Luca Bacci, Plasma 5.27.4).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, Plasma no longer closes when an application sends a window title that is too long (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27.4).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, screen recording and Task Manager thumbnails now work correctly for NVIDIA GPU users with proprietary drivers (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.27.4).
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 100 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.4 it will arrive on April 4th, KDE Frameworks 105 should arrive on April 9th, and there is no news about Frameworks 6.0. KDE Gear 23.04 will be available from April 20, 23.08 will arrive in August, and Plasma 6 will arrive in the second half of 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.