Sometimes the mouse pointer gets frisky. He likes to hide, and we, among so many windows, have to play "Where's Wally." At Apple they thought this was a problem, and for a long time we have been able to see where the pointer is by moving the mouse or touch panel quickly. Its size grows for a moment. This is a feature you are working on KDE, and it is the most logical for developers like them who work with huge monitors or several at the same time.
The "KDE 6 Mega-Release" is approaching little by little. It will officially arrive in February, but in all likelihood it will stay for a while in KDE neon and some Rolling Release. It will be months until we start seeing them in the main Linux distributions, and for example Kubuntu could release everything from this Mega-Release in October 2024.
With a technical section, KDE explains that this week they added support for hardware cursors on NVIDIA GPUs and the System Preferences firewall page and the KDE Connect Widget have been upgraded to Qt6 and Plasma 6 respectively.
KDE Mega-Release: news
- You can now set the wallpaper for any of the screens from a System Preferences page (Méven Car):
- Discover now features a “Recently Published and Updated” section on the home page when using Flatpak or Snap as your default app backend, making the Linux app ecosystem feel more alive. Work is underway to also show this section when using distribution packages as the default source, as long as the distribution sends relatively frequent updates to the applications and not old software from years ago on the same date, which would make the section useless (Ivan Tkachenko ):
- The Night Light page of System Preferences now displays a graphical representation of active and inactive periods, as well as transition times (Ismael Asensio):
- The KWin “Shake to Find Cursor” effect, similar to macOS, has been implemented. For now it is disabled by default, so you have to enable it manually in the Desktop Effects page of System Preferences (Vlad Zahorodnii).
- Ark now offers the “Extract here and delete file” option for its context menu plugin, and in the process of making this possible, infrequently used menu items have been removed in favor of keeping the “Extract here, autodetect subfolder” option », which was the most useful and has now been renamed for clarity (Severin von Wnuck):
Interface improvements
- Auto-hide panels now respect the user-configurable delay that currently affects other screen border effects, so you can configure whether they will hide immediately when you touch them or wait for the amount of time you choose (Bharadwaj Raju).
- The glow effect that appears when the pointer approaches an edge or corner of the screen that will do something when touched now respects the system accent color (Ivan Tkachenko).
- The Morphing Popups effect now animates with the standard bending curve, which is more consistent and pleasing and also makes it faster (Timothy Bautista).
- KRunner and other KRunner-based searches, such as Overview, now have proper visual feedback when clicking on a search result (Kai Uwe Broulik).
- Kate's tool views and sidebar tabs can now be dragged and dropped to other locations (Waqar Ahmed).
- Pressing the Escape key in Spectacle while in rectangular region mode now returns you to the main window instead of exiting the application (Noah Davis).
Error correction
- Fixed the most common crash in Dolphin that could occur when copying a large number of files to another location, closing the Dolphin window, and then interacting with the overwrite/skip dialog (Akseli Lahtinen).
- Fixed another common bug in Dolphin that could occur after entering edit mode and then changing the Application Style (Akseli Lahtinen).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, Kicker submenus no longer go below a bottom panel, and windows marked "Keep on top of other windows" no longer also go above panel popups (David Edmundson).
- Fixed several visual issues with bouncing when launching the app in Wayland when using a scaling factor greater than 100% (Vlad Zahorodnii).
- Window titles containing a dash are no longer mixed up when displayed in Task Manager preview popups (Niccolò Venerandi).
- Fixed OSDs on the lock screen looking unhelpfully different from the OSDs shown anywhere else (Bharadwaj Raju).
- When you have multiple Battery widgets, the “Manually lock sleep and screen lock” switch now syncs between all of them (Natalie Clarius).
In terms of number of bugs, this week a total of 180 have been corrected.
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.