It's been a week and a half now, KDE released the Mega-Launch of 6. After that, we have already begun to return to normality, that is, to continue working on the future and correct errors of the present, but without anything so big on the horizon. The first corrections have been published this week, and more will arrive next Tuesday and another purge on March 26. But you have to go step by step.
When the 6 stabilizes, they will supposedly release two versions of Plasma a year, but that's still a ways off. The current plans are to continue with the development model they had in Plasma 5, and they have already started to really work on the new functions that will arrive in Plasma 6.1. What comes next is a list with the most outstanding news that there has been this week in KDE, a little shortened because several of them arrived last Tuesday with Plasma 6.0.1.
New Features Coming to KDE
- It is now possible to split embedded terminal views in Kate horizontally or vertically (Akseli Lahtinen, Kate 24.05).
- You can now configure whether the magnifying glass in Spectacle's Rectangular Region mode is always on, always off, or only on while holding down the Shift key (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05).
- There are now “edge barrier” and “corner barrier” features when using a multi-screen setup. These barriers add virtual space between screens, making it easier to click on pixels that touch the shared edges of the screen (Yifan Zhu, Plasma 6.1).
- The navigation bar of the Web Browser widget can now be hidden, making it suitable for cases where you are simply monitoring the same web page that you never leave (Shubham Arora, Plasma 6.1).
- Manually saving session now works in Wayland (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1).
Improvements in the user's interface
- When you have Spectacle configured to not take a screenshot on startup, the window that appears on startup now gives you the opportunity to take a screenshot as well (Noah Davis, 24.05/XNUMX).
- Page search results in System Preferences now better prioritize exact name matches (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 6.0.1).
- Using a keyboard shortcut to activate the Calculator widget in a Panel now passes focus to it correctly so you can start typing to calculate things immediately (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.0.2).
- Using Kicker's application menu launcher, it is now possible to perform unit calculations and conversions, and find power and session actions by searching for them (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1).
- The new “Shake cursor to find” effect is now enabled by default (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1).
- The new System Preference Printers page now better helps you know what to do when you encounter a driverless network printer that does not have the proper drivers installed (Mike Noe, Plasma 6.1).
- Dashboard widget popups now close when clicking on an empty area of Task Manager (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1).
- By default, XWayland applications can now listen for non-alphanumeric key presses, and shortcuts using modifier keys (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1).
- Bluetooth connection failures are now additionally mentioned in the widget popup itself, right next to the thing you clicked on to try the connection (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.1).
- The width of the clipboard history popup that appears when pressing Meta+V is now limited to a lower, more reasonable width when using an ultra-wide screen (Dominique Hummel, Plasma 6.1).
Correction of minor bugs
- Gwenview no longer crashes when opening certain FITS image files (Albert Astals Cid, Gwenview 24.02.1).
- Minimizing a Dolphin window no longer hides all its panels (Nicolas Fella, Dolphin 24.02.1).
- Fixed a bug with multiline text selection in Okular (Okular 24.02.1).
- When dragging a file in Dolphin, if it passes over other files and stays there for a while, the other files no longer open immediately (Akseli Lahtinen, Dolphin 24.05).
- Discover no longer crashes when searching for several fairly common terms, including “libreoffice” (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.0.2).
- Fixed “Move to Desktop > All Desktops” title bar menu item in X11 (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0.2).
- Fixed a case where Plasma could exit (not crash) with a Wayland protocol error after turning screens off and on again (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0.2).
- Fixed a bug where KWin could crash when opening a window on a secondary display connected to a secondary GPU (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.2).
- The previous fix for VLC and MPV not being able to maximize turned out to be not enough, so I reinforced it, and now it should actually work always (Łukasz Patron, Plasma 6.0.2)
- Fixed a bug that could cause Night Color to not work on systems with certain graphics hardware (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.2).
- The first search result in the Kicker app menu is no longer sometimes obscured by the search field (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.2).
- When dragging a window off the left side of the screen, the cursor no longer moves unexpectedly (Yifan Zhu, Plasma 6.0.2).
- Setting the system language to “C” on the Region and Language page of System Settings no longer clutters text in individual format previews (Han Young, Plasma 6.0.2).
- Fixed a case where Discover could crash on startup when its Flatpak backend was active (David Redondo, Plasma 6.1).
- When you have a Panel at the top of the screen, displaying its settings dialog no longer overlays the global Edit Mode Toolbar; instead, the toolbar jumps to the bottom of the screen where there is plenty of room for it (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.1).
- Downloading items in “Get New [Thing]” dialogs that only have a single file available works again (Akseli Lahtinen, Frameworks 6.1. Link).
- Several actions in KDE applications that open the default terminal application, such as Dolphin's "Open Terminal Here" menu item, work again (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.1).
- The "horizontal bar" charts in various System Monitor widgets now use the correct colors (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 6.1).
- Menu items in context menus for text fields in QtQuick-based applications are now translated (Evgeny Chesnokov, Frameworks 6.1).
- A group of place icons in the Breeze icon theme respect the accent color, as do their compatriots (Someone with the pseudonym "leia uwu", Frameworks 6.1).
This week a total of 173 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 6.0.2 will arrive next Tuesday, March 12, and Plasma 6.1 will arrive in June, on the 18th. Frameworks 6.1 will arrive on April 5 and KDE Gear 24.02.1 is scheduled for March 21. Looking at the page of these releases, it is confirmed that 24.02 will only have two maintenance updates, and probably in August it will return to the usual numbering/scheduling of a new major update in April-August-December.
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.