A week ago today, when we published Article about news in KDE, we were already advancing that the project had put the batteries to correct many bugs. This week, Nate Graham revealed what seems to be the reason: people say they want them to slow down the pace of adding things a bit and focus on stability for a while. And you've heard: during the Plasma 5.26 beta month, pretty much all you're doing is fixing bugs.
plasma 5.26 They were already promised to be happy with the improvements it was going to bring, but it was also known that it was going to improve 5.25, which did not arrive in top form (although it improves a lot in Wayland compared to 5.24). When the stable version is released, what we will get will be a major release that not only introduces new features, but is also expected to be much more stable.
New Features Coming to KDE
- Kdenlive has now adopted KHamburgerMenu, so if its normal menu bar (which remains visible by default) is disabled, its full menu structure can still be accessed (Julius Künzel, Kdenlive 22.12).
- If your keyboard has a "Calculator" button, pressing it will open KCalc (Paul Worrall, KCalc 22.12).
Improvements in the user's interface
- The global edit mode toolbar now has a nicer and smoother enter/exit animation (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.7).
- Plasma Media Player and Notifications plasmoids are now grouped with system services instead of application status indicators, so system tray icons for applications will always be together in a group, without these plasmoids appear in seemingly random positions relative to each other (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26).
- You can switch tabs again in Kickoff using the Ctrl+Tab shortcut, and now also the standard ones (Ctrl+Page Up / Ctrl+Page Down and Ctrl+[ / Ctrl+]) (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26).
- The marks we make on the screen using the mouse mark effect now appear in screenshots and screen recordings (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26).
- On the lock screen, you can now zoom in and out and clear the password field with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+U, which is semi-common (Ezike Ebuka and Aleix Pol González, Plasma 5.26 and Frameworks 5.99).
- Tooltips in Plasma and QtQuick-based applications now smoothly fade in and out (Bharadwaj Raju, Frameworks 5.99).
Important bug fixes
- In the Plasma Wayland session, Plasma no longer sometimes crashes when dragging Kickoff items that are not on the Favorites page to another location (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.7).
- In the Fonts page of System Preferences, the sub-pixel anti-aliasing and hinting settings now reflect the true state of reality on first boot, as configured by the distribution, instead of always inaccurately saying that the system is using RGB sub-pixel anti-aliasing and a slight hint (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.24.7).
- Also fixed the most common Plasma crash that could sometimes occur when searching with KRunner (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.26).
- Fixed the second most common Plasma crash, which could sometimes occur when dragging widgets out of the widget browser (Fushan Wen, the latest version of the KDE Qt patch collection).
- Widgets and desktop icons no longer randomly move and reset their positions sometimes when logged in (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26).
- When using an NVIDIA GPU in the Plasma Wayland session, clicking the Kickoff panel button now always opens as expected (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.26).
- We also fixed a major issue with NVIDIA GPUs that could cause various Plasma elements to become visually corrupted after the system woke up from sleep (David Edmundson and Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.26).
- Right after the system wakes up, the desktop stops showing for a moment just before the lock screen appears (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.26).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, dragging files to Firefox now works correctly again (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26).
- Slowing down a maximized window while using a floating panel no longer leaves a weird shadow floating in space (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26).
- The “Add Panel” submenu of the desktop context menu no longer shows non-functional items for “Empty Pool Plasma” and “Empty System Tray” (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, those using the latest Frameworks plus Plasma 5.25.5 should now see their widgets and notifications placed in the correct place (Xaver Hugl, Frameworks 5.99 or distro-patched 5.98).
- Floating panels and corners of Plasma dialogs and popups no longer display the usual dots and other visual glitches (Niccolò Venerandi, Frameworks 5.99).
- Fixed another way that some Kirigami-based scroll views using a recent version of the KDE Qt patch collection might display an unnecessary horizontal scroll bar (Marco Martin, Kirigami 5.99).
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. The list of high priority bugs has been lowered from 17 to 11.
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.26 will arrive on Tuesday, October 11, Frameworks 5.99 will be available on October 8 and KDE Gear 22.08.2 on October 13. KDE Applications 22.12 does not yet have an official release date scheduled.
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.