KDE seems determined to improve practically everything in Plasma 6. They are imagining a lot and good things, and the latest is that the bottom panel will automatically hide when a window touches it. It's something I've seen elsewhere, and forgive me if I don't detail which ones because I'm not sure. In GNOME? In Windows and macOS it is available, and it is a function that I will activate as soon as it is available; now I have the panel always hidden (even when there are no windows open) and it is not visible until I hover over the bottom edge.
This is just one of the news that have been added in the last week, but there is more, such as a change to the color of Konsole's highlighted text and a couple that will arrive with Plasma 5.27.10 that will be available in a few weeks.
News that will arrive with KDE Plasma 6
- Plasma panels now have a new visibility mode: “Window Dodge”, also known as “smart auto-hide”. Essentially, the panel self-hides when touched by a window, but is otherwise visible (Bharadwaj Raju and Niccolò Venerandi).
- KWin now implements support for the Wayland “Presentation time” protocol (Xaver Hugl).
- The appearance of KDE applications based on QtWidgets (Carl Schwan) has been improved:
- KDE QML software-based list articles now use a nicer rounded highlighting style (Arjen Hiemstra and Carl Schwan):
- When creating a new blank panel, it now comes with an “Add Widgets…” button to save some time (Niccolò Venerandi).
- The Breeze icon theme has gained symbolic variants of the weather icons, meaning that when you use a Weather Report widget in the dashboard, it is no longer the only thing in or near your system tray with a colorful icon ( Alois Spitzbart:
- When you scroll down one of the “Get New [Thing]” dialogs to load new content, it now loads without launching a giant full-window loading indicator that blocks your view of what you were viewing (Rishi Kumar) .
- Ported all Plasma widget configuration dialogs to use the same base components we use for System Preferences pages, allowing for more unified code and also frameless, edge-to-edge scrollable views like in System Preferences (Nicolas Fella).
- The confusing “Always organize tasks in columns of so many rows” setting in the Task Manager widget has been redesigned in the user interface to make it understandable (Niccolò Venerandi).
- Improved app launch time in Plasma Wayland session (David Edmundson).
- Elisa now always uses her internal music indexer instead of Baloo. This unifies UX and codepath indexing, as many users did not have Baloo available and were using the internal indexer anyway. The result is 10 open bug reports fixed (Christoph Cullmann).
- The default color scheme of Konsole's "Breeze" terminal now uses the more striking and attractive "Plasma Blue" color for intense text (Thiago Sueto):
- In Dolphin, it is now possible to turn inline previews on and off with the F12 key, just like in open/save dialogs (Eric Armbruster).
Correction of minor bugs
- Brightness control now works on FreeBSD systems (Gleb Popov, Plasma 5.27.10).
- The preferred web browser is now searched more reliably (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.10.).
- Moving the pointer over a partially visible list item in several Plasma widgets no longer automatically scrolls the view to make the list item fully visible, which could be quite annoying in certain circumstances (e.g. for items very large list entries, or moving the pointer up from the bottom of the list to try to get to an item at the top) and it bothered a lot of people (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 6.0).
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. This week a total of 190 bugs.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.10 will arrive on December 10, Frameworks 113 will arrive in the second week of the same month and on February 28, 2024, Plasma 6, KDE Frameworks 6 and KDE Gear 24.02.0 will arrive.
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.