I don't know why, but this week it was on a Friday. When they launched the KDE Usability & Productivity initiative they published the future news on Sunday, later they followed and have been publishing it on Saturday, and today Nate Graham, from KDE Community, posted the note on Friday. Will it be like this from now on? The only thing we can say is that it was like this today and that we have been told about bug fixes that have been around for a long time.
The headline of the note just reminds me of that past where KDE / Plasma was a mess on many machines. This is no longer the case today, but I get the impression that some of those failures were still present and will disappear soon. This is not said by Graham, but he does say that for sure in this News list Future stories mention something we've been suffering from.
New features coming to the KDE desktop
- Dolphin is now able to display thumbnail sequences for miners that support it when hovering over files and folders (David Lerch, Dolphin 21.08).
- A wide variety of functions in KDE applications that depend on the Solid library now work in OpenBSD thanks to the new support for UDisks2 (Rafael Sadowski, Frameworks 5.85).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- Spectacle no longer crashes when using any of the image upload plugins that come from the legacy Kipi plugin system (Adriaan de Groot, Spectacle 21.08).
- Okular now displays alt text (if configured) for inaccessible images in Markdown documents (Yuri Chornoivan, Okular 21.08).
- In Plasma Wayland, when a high DPI scaling factor is used, the GTK application windows no longer display several of its UI elements at too small a size (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22.4).
- The System Preferences keyboard page is now fully translatable, so the missing translations should be added soon (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.22.4).
- You are no longer warned by a notification that the SMART-enabled disk is showing signs of instability. This generated too many false positives because the disks were reporting their status incorrectly or inaccurately characterizing transient conditions as instability. It still warns of normal error conditions (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.22.4).
- In Plasma Wayland, right-clicking a task in the Task Manager now does what it should instead of closing the context menu when the task tool information disappears (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23).
- In Plasma Wayland, certain non-resizable windows no longer erroneously display maximize buttons (Plasma 5.23).
- Task manager tooltip now consumes less memory (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.23).
- In Plasma Wayland, native Wayland applications that make use of "subsurfaces" are now correctly positioned when they ask to be positioned below their main window (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23).
- The access speed for reading global configuration files has been improved, which should make many things a bit faster, including starting the application (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.85).
- Updating certain types of GHNS elements in various applications like KStars now works again (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.85).
Interface improvements
- Various dialogs in KMail and the other PIM applications have been modernized and unchecked (Carl Schwan, KDE PIM 21.08).
- When an application is playing media, the Task Manager thumbnails for each of its windows now only show the album art for that media when the window title matches the media; this should fix the problem that all windows always show album art instead of thumbnails in almost all cases. (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.23).
- The list of screen refresh rates on the System Preferences Screen Settings page is now sorted in descending order (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.23).
- When hovering over a source button in Discover, the tooltip now specifically indicates which repository within the source it came from, in the event that the backend has multiple repos configured (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23).
- The icon picker dialog has received a visual and UX overhaul and now displays SVG icons accurately for high DPI users (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.85).
- The "About" pages in each Kirigami-based application now mention the full name of the application itself and also show the role / type of work performed by each contributor if that data is set (Felipe Kinoshita, Frameworks 5.85).
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.22.4 is coming July 27 and, after the set launched yesterday, KDE Gear 21.08 will arrive on August 12. Tomorrow, July 10, Frameworks 5.84 will arrive, and 5.85 will arrive on August 14. Already after the summer, Plasma 5.23 will land with the new theme, among other things, on October 12.
To enjoy all this as soon as possible we have to add the KDE Backports repository or use an operating system with special repositories like Kde neon or any distribution whose development model is Rolling Release, although the latter usually take a little longer than the KDE system.