Last Tuesday, October 18, KDE He launched plasma 5.26.1 with the first batch of fixes for the 5.26 series. The project is ambitious, and wants to do a lot and in many corners, so they have a lot of fabric to cut and a lot of fringes to fix. In this week's article on KDE they have once again teased some of the improvements they are working on, and many of them are to improve the user interface.
As new features, this time they have only mentioned one: the firewall page of the system preferences now supports IP address strings with netmasks, and it is something that we will see already in Plasma 5.27. The rest of the News list collect interface improvements and a small list of bug fixes.
Interface improvements coming to KDE
- In the Info tab of the Gwenview sidebar, the area occupied by the metadata and description section can now be reduced by using a draggable divider between it and the Image Info section above it. Also, the divider remembers its position. (Corbin Schwimmbeck, Gwenview 22.12):
- Spectacle now remembers the area of the last chosen rectangular region by default, even between app launches. This is configurable of course (Bharadwaj Raju, Spectacle 22.12).
- The Kate and KWrite splash screen (which is still optional, and can be permanently disabled via a checkbox on the screen itself) now includes links to the documentation (Eugene Popov, Kate, and KWrite 22.12):
- In the Plasma Wayland session, opening Dolphin from the Disks and Devices popup now raises your existing window, if it was already open (Nicolas Fella, Dolphin 22.12 with Plasma 5.26.1).
- Dragging and dropping windows into the Widget Pager now works much better, with less hassle (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.26.1).
- When using Plasma, the "Open file with application..." dialog now uses the XDG portal version to improve visual consistency and ease of use. The old dialog is still used when calling the "Open this file in a different app" functionality from a KDE app that is not being used in Plasma (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27):
- System tray widgets that can be middle-clicked to toggle something on or off now indicate this in their tool descriptions (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27):
- In the Plasma Wayland session, the Help Center is now able to raise its open window when activated by another application (Nicolas Fella, Help Center 5.27).
- The icon size popup in System Preferences has received a UI overhaul to remove unused settings and make what it does more understandable (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27):
- When the Plasma calendar popup is resized, the text in the calendar itself now scales up and down appropriately (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27):
- The Overview, Present Windows, and Desktop Grid effects now work harder to pack windows efficiently, so hopefully you won't see windows arranged like ladders anymore (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.27).
- When viewing the page for a Flatpak app that has been marked end-of-life by its developer, Discover now displays the reason given by the developer (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27).
- The shadows behind the clock and date text on the login and lock screens are now a bit smoother and prettier (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27).
- The Lock Keys Widget now displays a different icon than the Keyboard Layout Widget, so you can tell them apart at a glance (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, the "Something is recording your screen" systray icon now uses a more correct "recording" style icon (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27).
- Attempting to trash an item that is larger than the current size of the trash now gives the option to delete it immediately (Ahmad Samir, Dolphin 22.12 with Frameworks 5.100).
- Avatar images in all KDE software are now sharper and look better when using high DPI display and display scaling (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.100).
- Recent document lists in all KDE software will now display the appropriate icons for recent files (Eric Armbruster, Frameworks 5.100).
Important bug fixes
- Fixed another cause of desktop widgets moving slightly on login, which apparently has multiple causes (Aaron Rainbolt, Plasma 5.24.8).
- Fixed an issue that could cause input to not be detected when using the new mouse button rewind feature (David Redondo, Plasma 5.26.2 with Frameworks 5.100).
- Plasma no longer constantly consumes high CPU resources when using an animated AVIF image as the wallpaper (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.100).
- Plasma no longer consistently consumes high CPU resources when middle-click paste is disabled and certain content is copied (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.100).
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 144 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.26.2 will arrive on Tuesday, October 25 and Frameworks 5.100 will be available on November 12. Plasma 5.27 will arrive on February 14, and there is already an official release date for KDE Applications 22.12, on December 8.
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.
Information and images: pointieststick.com.