Plasma 5.25 release date is getting closer and just when we thought they would have everything ready and they were going to focus on polishing it, Nate Graham arrives and publish a future news note mentioning new features in its headline. I didn't have to look very hard to know which one stands out the most, in fact I only had to look at the first one to notice something new, or at least to KDE.
Although well, KDE can be customized and we can put it practically as we want, but this new function is official and we can use it from the settings. And before continuing, the header image is a montage, a not very good one, in which the Deepin dock has been placed on top of the Plasma 5.24 background. But this new function goes that way: as of Plasma 5.25 it will be possible to make bottom panel has a floating appearance.
15 minute bugs fixed
The account remains at 70, since two new ones have appeared and they have corrected the following two:
- The volume and brightness OSDs return to showing their visual indicator bars on the lock and login screens (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.24.5, Now available).
- When an application gives the system both an icon name and an image for its System Tray icon, the System Tray now prefers the icon name, so if there is such an icon in its icon theme, it will see it and will respect your color scheme. This affected Telegram, for example (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.6).
New Features Coming to KDE
- The panel can now be given a "floating" appearance. In this mode, it still behaves identically to a traditional panel, and clicks in the empty area will be redirected to the panel. Also, the panel "stops floating" when any window is maximized (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.25).
Note: I don't usually add images so that these posts don't weigh too much and so that you can visit the original if you want more details, but in this case it seemed necessary.
- Discover now shows the level of access apps have to system resources. When an app is isolated, you get a detailed list of things the app is automatically allowed to do (Suhaas Joshi and Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25).
- When uninstalling a sandboxed app in Discover, it now offers the ability to easily delete user data and settings if desired (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25).
- The Panorama effect now offers the option to exclude minimized windows, just like Present Windows does (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- When using Dolphin's "Open Terminal" function, it once again opens the terminal to the currently selected folder (if any) instead of always opening it to the current folder (Someone who goes by the pseudonym "oioi 555" , Dolphin 22.08).
- Elisa now shows the covers of songs and albums that have the covers embedded in the files, not just next to them (Tranter Madi, Elisa 22.08).
- System Monitor returns to display information for AMD GPUs (David Redondo, Plasma 5.24.6).
- Flickr and Simon Stålenhag Picture of the Day wallpapers no longer change more than once a day (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.6).
- The text on global menu items again follows the Plasma theme color scheme (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.6).
- The Display Settings page of System Preferences now shows the correct refresh rates in more circumstances (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.6).
- Fixed one of the ways the kded daemon could crash in the Plasma Wayland session (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25).
- Under the hood, the Present Windows and Desktop Grid effects have been rewritten to use the same backend as the Overview effect, fixing a total of 44 Bugzilla tickets, giving them a consistent visual style, and modernizing their code to keep them fresh. in the future (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25).
- System Monitor charts using the "Horizontal Bars" style can now meaningfully display values equal to or very close to 0 (Trent McPheron, Plasma 5.25).
- Fixed a memory leak when changing the wallpaper plugin (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25).
- When any of the routes in the System Preferences Locations page are changed, all markers in the Places Panel that pointed to the old locations are automatically updated to point to the new locations (Méven Car, Plasma 5.25).
- The system monitor now shows the correct icons for applications that launch automatically at login (David Redondo, Plasma 5.25).
- Breeze's cursors are no longer slightly smaller than they should be (Chris Chris, Plasma 5.25).
- Plasma no longer crashes if it can't find the active theme (David Faure, Frameworks 5.94).
- Dolphin no longer crashes when closed from the Command Palette "Close Tab" list item (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.94).
- Fixed a bug that could cause file transfers to SMB shares to fail the second and/or subsequent times a transfer was made (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 5.94).
- Fixed a memory leak affecting many Kirigami-based applications (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.94).
Improvements in the user's interface
- Kate now shows her default toolbar (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 22.08).
- Kate's menu bar has been rearranged a bit to make each one less huge and intimidating. In particular, there is now a new “Selection” menu that contains actions that will apply only to whatever is selected (Eric Armbruster, Kate 22.08).
- Various KWin scripts that are implemented in JavaScript (such as the Show Desktop effect) now follow your fingers when activated by a gesture (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25).
- A lot of KWin effects are now triggerable by touchscreen edge swipes (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25).
- When fingerprint authentication is configured, the lock screen now allows immediate unlocking by placing your finger on the fingerprint reader; it is no longer necessary to press the “unlock” button with an empty password field (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25).
- Places can now be added to the "Favorites" list/grid in Kickoff, Kicker and the App Drawer (Méven Car, Plasma 5.25).
- The Klipper settings window has been reorganized a bit to have a new "Actions Menu" page, which contains the relevant settings for the actions menu when any Klipper action is in use; if you're not, you can ignore it entirely (Jonathan Marten, Plasma 5.25).
- File open/save dialogs and inline icon views in various applications such as Kdenlive now allow icons to be scaled up to a size of 512px (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.94).
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.25 is coming June 14, and Frameworks 5.94 will be available next week on May 14. KDE Gear 22.04.1 will land with bug fixes on Thursday 12th May. KDE Gear 22.08 does not yet have an official scheduled date. Regarding Plasma 5.24.6, say that 5.24 is LTS, so it will continue to receive point updates until it reaches the end of its life cycle, but the exact date is not known.
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.