After a week in which KDE seemed to have focused on bugs and forgotten about new features, this week seems to have turned the tables. In a section of new features in which there are usually 2-4 points, twice as many have been mentioned today, 8. But new features are not the only thing that makes something look totally different, and there have also been many cosmetic tweaks. .
The first new function that they have advanced to us will come from the hand of Herald Sitter and will do so together with Dragon player 23.04 (header capture), a KDE video and audio player that is probably not well known because we tend to use other options like VLC or MPV more. Dragon Player will receive important improvements in the interface, such as the KHamburguerMEnu and a welcome screen, among others such as that it will behave better in Wayland.
New Features Coming to KDE
- Filelight now has a list view on the left side of the window, which provides a simple text-based method of viewing size information. Various tooltip bugs have also been fixed and blurriness has been removed in the radar chart view (Harald Sitter, Filelight 23.04):
- Ark now supports extracting Stuffit Expander .sit files (Elvis Angelaccio, Ark 23.04).
- There is now a new “Touch Screen” page in System Preferences that allows you to disable touch screens and choose which physical screen your input is assigned to (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.27).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, displays now get a default scaling factor that more appropriately matches their DPI, based on the type of device they are (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27).
- Applications can now be autostarted multiple times (eg to launch multiple instances of it) and it also shows the paths where autostarted scripts live (Thenujan Sandramohan, Plasma 5.27).
- Folder view can now be set to show hidden files (Willyanto, Plasma 5.27).
- The drawing tablet page of System Preferences now allows you to map the physical drawing tablet buttons to keyboard shortcuts (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27).
Improvements in the user's interface
- When unlocking the screen by providing your fingerprint, you no longer have to redundantly press an "Unlock" button afterwards (Janet Blackquill, Plasma 5.26.4).
- The way to choose or change a location in the weather widget is now easier and more direct (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.27):
- When using the Canadian weather provider, the layout of the weather widget is now much better and clearer, and is no longer visually clipped sometimes (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.27):
- On the Users page of System Preferences, the way to choose which fingers to use for fingerprint authentication is now much more visually intuitive. In addition, individual fingers can now be unenrolled, and when changing the password you will no longer see the "passwords do not match" message until after you hit the "Set Password" button, or a few seconds after you stop typing ( Janet Blackquill and Devin Lin, Plasma 5.27):
- In System Preferences' Display Settings page, screens are now required to touch and not partially overlap, which prevents various weird bugs from occurring (David Redondo, Plasma 5.27)
- The Audio Volume widget tooltip no longer unnecessarily says that the output is playing in "Speaker" when there is only one output device, and instead mentions the fact that we can hover over the icon to change the volume ( Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27):
- Breeze-based theme popups now have rounder edges that are more consistent with those of windows (Niccolò Venerandi, Frameworks 5.101):
- The Breeze icon theme now includes an icon for SimpleScreenRecorder (Manuel Jesús de la Fuente, Frameworks 5.101):
Correction of minor bugs
- In Plasma Wayland session, touching a touch screen after disconnecting an external screen no longer crashes KWin (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.26.4).
- Plasma notifications no longer have inappropriate top corners (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.26.4).
- In Plasma X11 session, disabling compositing no longer leaves an empty area around Plasma panels (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.26.4).
- Searching via the KRunner powered search in the overview no longer sometimes crashes KWin (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.27).
- Fixed issue where maximized XWayland apps sometimes have a one pixel blank border on the right edge of the screen in Plasma Wayland session (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27).
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 152 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.26.4 will arrive on Tuesday, November 29 and Frameworks 5.101 will be available on December 3. Plasma 5.27 will arrive on February 14, and KDE Applications 22.12 will be available on December 8; from 23.04 it is only known that they will arrive in April 2023..
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.