Last weekend, Nate Graham published something that is going to change the way we use Linux with KDE: a system for stacking windows that, although we don't know what it will end up in, we can think that it will be similar to what Pop!_OS offers. If we pay attention to what we have seen in recent weeks, it seems that they have stepped on the accelerator, because this time they have told us about an application that is used a lot and that in four months it will be much better.
The app in question is Spectacle. Graham says that they are rewriting their interface, and that will allow them to make changes like we can score in the rectangular selection area. In addition, in the future they will also be able to integrate a screen recorder, something that is already available in the GNOME screenshot tool. It is, without a doubt, the highlight of the article news this week.
What's New Coming Soon to KDE
- Spectacle's interface has been rewritten in QML, making it easier to develop and will soon be able to screen record. In the process, the annotation function has been integrated into the rectangular area selector, so you can choose an area and start annotating immediately. The selector interface is also much more responsive, and 12 bugs have been fixed in the process (Noah Davis and Marco Martin, Spectacle 23.04).
- There are now KWin actions for "Move window one screen left/right/up/down" that you can use and to which you can assign keyboard shortcuts, if your personal workflow requires it (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27).
Interface improvements
- The Bluetooth widget tooltip now shows the battery status of any connected device that can report battery (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27):
- The tooltips for the Battery and Brightness and Media Player widgets now indicate that we can do something by hovering over them (Nate Graham and Nikolai Weitkemper, Plasma 5.27)
- The list of applets in the System Tray settings window has been made fully accessible and navigable with the keyboard (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27)
- The estimated time remaining before battery depletion has been smoothed, so it won't jump up or down in response to momentary spikes or dips in power usage (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27)
- Scrolling a media player widget to adjust the volume of the playing application now causes the widget to rise or fall in increments equal to the global scroll step configurable in System Preferences, instead of having its own private setting for it ( Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27).
- The side drawers of Kirigami-based applications can now also be closed by pressing the Escape key or by clicking on an empty grayed-out area of the view (Matej Starc, Frameworks 5.102).
Correction of minor bugs
- When Plasma browser integration is installed, Media Player no longer displays two sets of playback controls (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, several subtle issues related to pasting have been fixed, including panel widgets having a delay before closing after copying a file into Dolphin and then closing Dolphin, and also copied text interacting with the Clipboard widget itself cannot be pasted into the text fields of Plasma widgets (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.102).
- When a widget is deleted and then the system is rebooted or plasmashell is restarted while the notification “Undelete this widget?” still visible, the widget now disappears as expected when Plasma is started again (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.102).
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 102 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.26.5 will arrive on Tuesday, January 3 and Frameworks 5.102 should arrive on the 14th of the same month. 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.