KDE prepares a new SDDM for Plasma 6, an update that comes two and a half years after the previous one. News

Although it may not be given too much importance, the SDDM is something that you see every time you turn on a computer or restart a session if you use this manager. The last major update came about two and a half years ago, and KDE will take advantage of the jump to Plasma 6 to renew it. It will soon enter the incubator, and, once the work is finished, it will arrive at the end of 2023 together with the trio of six that many of us are waiting for, not without some respect for the problems that we may encounter.

Among the news of plasma 6, todo has been ported to use KSvg, a new library for managing SVGs that can also be used outside of Plasma. On the other hand, performance with multi-GPU systems using the second NVIDIA has been greatly improved, and Qt scaling will be used in X11, improving the DPI scaling experience. This will not be supported in X11, so uploading to Wayland is encouraged. Of course, it is a proposal for the future, when Plasma 6 is released.

New Features Coming to KDE

• The Welcome Center now has a "Live Environment" mode that can be used by distributions to display a special page in their "live" environments, including a nice friendly button to launch the installer (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.0):

• The Web Browser widget now displays your site's favicon as the default Dashboard icon, and can also be overridden to set a custom icon (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0):

• You can now open the Partition Manager from the Removable Devices context menu in Dolphin and other apps using the standard Locations Panel, so you can reformat them from there if you want (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 6.0):

Improvements in the user's interface

• Dolphin now hides app temporary files and backup files (ie the kind of useless files ending in ~ or #) unless you actively show hidden files (Méven Car, Dolphin 23.08). This is a request from 23 years ago.
• In System Monitor, the text of list items without icons now aligns visually with the text of list items that have icons (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.0):

Correction of minor bugs

Many are labeled Plasma 5.27.6, so they should be available by now.

• Distros that use rpm-ostree for packaging (such as Fedora Kinoite) again receive updates using Discover (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.6)
• The Thunderbolt page of System Preferences no longer suffers from a design flaw that would hide text with large windows (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27.6)
• KWin no longer sometimes crashes when the tooltip of a window title bar button is accidentally clicked, instead of the button itself being pointed at (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.6)
• When using a fractional scaling factor, the Discover settings page checkboxes are no longer blurred when scrolling the page with a trackpad (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 5.27.6).
• Fixed some ways in which KWin could crash immediately after logging in under certain circumstances (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27.7).
• Notifications from Snap apps now appear more reliably, including Slack (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.27.7)

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 73 bugs have been fixed.

When will this all come to KDE?

plasma 5.27.7 will arrive on Tuesday, September 19 (if I'm not mistaken in counting weeks), and there is no confirmed date on Frameworks 6.0. Although nothing has been mentioned today, KDE Gear 23.04.3 will be available on July 6, 23.08 will arrive in August and Plasma 6 will arrive in the second half of 2023. There is still no official date confirmed, but there is a page where they will report about the releases of the next version of Plasma.

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.