There are less than three weeks left until what the team of developers that uses the letter K so often refers to as officially arrives. KDE 6 Mega-Release. It will be on February 28, and the stable versions of Plasma 6, Frameworks 6 and the February 2024 applications will arrive, and in systems like KDE neon they will also go up to Qt6. But we should not waste a moment and week after week they inform us of the changes made, among which the corrections stand out lately.
Minus two points of news that will arrive in Plasma 6.1, everything included in the note news this week It is divided into two points: bug fixes and improvements to the user interface. It is clear that that launch is almost there, and that Nate Graham not publishing long articles could be good news; It may mean that everything is in good shape, but this is something we will discover from the 28th.
KDE interface improvements
- The KWin setting “Active screen follows mouse” has disappeared; now the active screen is always the one with the active window (Vlad Zahorodnii).
- You can now manually set the data range for “horizontal bar” charts in System Monitor and its widgets (Arjen Hiemstra).
- When using the “Always show all entries” option in the System Tray, all entries are now actually shown, instead of keeping some of them hidden based on internal logic that was not obvious (Jin Liu).
- Searching clipboard entries is now case-insensitive (Yifan Zhu).
Error correction
- Fixed an issue that could cause the screen to go black with only a moving cursor when waking the system from sleep while using an NVIDIA GPU with its proprietary drivers (David Redondo).
- CPU temperature sensors now work for a variety of Intel and AMD motherboards where they did not work before (Arjen Hiemstra).
- When the System Monitor window is opened in a maximized state, de-maximizing it now returns it to its pre-maximized geometry as expected (Arjen Hiemstra).
- In several Kirigami-based applications, double-clicking a page to open it multiple times is no longer interpreted that way, as opening the same page multiple times is pointless, which prevents accidentally breaking the application (Arjen Hiemstra).
- KScreen is now smarter about choosing the most appropriate display settings when asked to make one display mirror another (Yifan Zhu).
- The buttons and scroll bars in the Sticky Notes widget are now always distinguishable, regardless of the color we choose for the note background and the color scheme of your system (Nate Graham).
- A couple of Plasma UI elements with text that were previously not translatable now are (Emil Sari).
- When Task Manager is configured to show only tasks on the current screen, it now continues to work when changing the screen layout without restarting Plasma ("Someone Awesome").
- Header text in System Tray applets is now elided instead of overflowing with a small window size and very long applet text (Nate Graham).
In total, 145 bugs have been fixed this week.
other developments
- When you press the Alt+Tab shortcut without any windows open, you will now see a nice “No windows open” message instead of a broken-looking task switcher or even nothing (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1).
- The old feature of adding a spacer to window title bars returns. (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1).
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.11 It should arrive this month, and Frameworks 115 should be available later today. Plasma 28, KDE Frameworks 2024 and KDE Gear 6 will arrive on February 6, 24.02.0. The next major update of the applications will land in May, and the next one will probably return to the usual schedule of 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.