There is less to go. Plasma 5.23 was the 25th anniversary edition, but we have to look to the future. At present, if we also count the preliminary versions. And it is that KDE has released this week the beta of Plasma 5.24, the next version of its graphical environment. This is how Nate Graham titled your weekly article about the news of the project, announcing the availability and encouraging daring users to install the beta to go hunting bugs to eliminate them.
Many of the novelties that we are seeing in recent weeks will already arrive in plasma 5.24, but the April 2022 applications (KDE Gear 22.04) and its Framework are also mentioned at many points, the next one being v91. Below you have the list with everything that we have advanced today.
New Features Coming to KDE
- The Disks and Devices applet now gives us the option to open KDE Partition Manager with the specific partition (Nate Graham, KDE Partition Manager 22.04).
- You can now configure which applications will open or handle geo:// and tel:// links (Volker Krause and Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.24.
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- Gwenview no longer sometimes crashes when zooming out of an image in full screen mode (Nicolas Fella, Gwenview 21.12.2).
- Elisa no longer crashes sometimes when trying to queue files (Yerrey Dev, Elisa 21.12.2).
- The overwrite dialog shown when extracting files with Ark that have the same name as other files already there no longer misleadingly always says: "The files are identical" (Albert Astals Cid, Ark 22.04).
- Taking a screenshot with Spectacle using the terminal flags (eg spectacle -bc) no longer causes two notifications to be shown (Antonio Prcela, Spectacle 22.04).
- The System Preferences Printers page no longer displays long printer names in an ugly, pixelated way when using a high DPI scaling factor (Kai Uwe Broulik, print-manager 22.04).
- In the Plasma Wayland session:
- Fixed a case where KWin could crash randomly (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24).
- System Preferences font management is now available (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24).
- The Help Center should no longer randomly crash when moving the cursor or hovering over links (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 5.91).
- Opening and closing the Widget Explorer sidebar no longer rearranges windows (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.91).
- Turning off a monitor no longer sometimes causes its panels to disappear (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.24).
- Fixed various graphical glitches with multi-monitor setups (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 524).
- Tab close buttons no longer always have circles around their 'X' symbol (Luke Horwell, Plasma 5.24).
- The initials text in the System Preferences users page no longer sometimes overflows (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24).
- System Preferences pages with “Get New” buttons » now use less memory (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.91).
Improvements in the user's interface
- The System Preferences and Information Center pages can now be found by searching for your keywords in searches performed by KRunner, Kickoff, the Overview effect, etc. (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24).
- Plasma's folder view now always shows tooltips for items whose titles are elided, just like Dolphin does (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24).
- The Bluetooth applet can now be middle-clicked to turn Bluetooth on or off (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25).
- Search fields in apps that use Kirigami now have a little magnifying glass on them, and even have an animated disappearing effect when the search field is focused (Carl Schwan, Frameworks 5.91).
- The Places Panel, even in Dolphin, now has a small Eject button on it next to the executable/removable disks (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.91).
- KHamburgerMenu's menus now have a simpler layout for the bottom items: there is now a "More" item at the bottom that shows the rest of the menu items, and the "Help" item is right above it, and both have proper icons ( Mufeed Ali, Frameworks 5.91).
- The bottom navigation bars now use the new selection style (Felipe Kinoshita, Frameworks 5.91).
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.24 will arrive on February 8, and KDE Frameworks 5.91 will follow four days later, on February 12. Plasma 5.25, which we were told about for the first time today, will arrive on June 14. KDE Gear 22.04 does not yet have a scheduled date, or the official website does not pick it up like this. If any readers find out about something posted on an unofficial "wall", as has happened on occasion in the past, please leave the information in the comments.
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.