This week, KDE launched plasma 5.26. Although they introduced new features, in recent weeks they focused on fixing bugs to improve stability, and it seems that they succeeded. According to Nate Graham, it has been mostly a "soft launch," with only a few regressions reported. If this is so, Plasma 5.26 would have arrived in much better shape than 5.25, a version that some distributions delayed as long as possible in order not to suffer from the different bugs that were being reported.
Still, there is no perfect software, and everything can be improved. Several of the points News list This week they carry the "signature" of Plasma 5.26.1, which is the first maintenance update that usually arrives a week after the release of point-zero. Of the rest of the changes, some will arrive as early as Plasma 5.27, which is expected to be the last version of the 5 series, and KDE Gear 22.12.
New Features Coming to KDE
- Kate and KWrite have adopted KHamburgerMenu. Since these are large and complex applications, at the moment the main menu bar is still shown by default, and the hamburger menu shows all the traditional menu structure within it, instead of trying to offer a set of selected actions (Christoph Cullmann, Kate & KWrite 22.12):
- Kate's splash screen now has more options (Eugene Popov, Kate 22.12):
- Plasma Wayland session now supports high resolution scroll wheels for smoother scrolling through long views (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.27).
- The network manager now supports WPA3-Enterprise 192-bit mode (Tomohiro Mayama, Plasma 5.26).
Improvements in the user's interface
- Dolphin no longer unnecessarily opens a new window after extracting or compressing a file using the context menu (Andrey Butirsky, Dolphin 22.12).
- Discover no longer freezes for a few seconds when launched without an internet connection, and is now faster and more responsive to transient network issues with remote resources on your backends (Aleix Pol González, Plasma 5.26.1) .
- The Media Player plasmoid now does a better job of handling applications with very basic MPRIS implementations, such as Totem and Celluloid (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.26.1).
- Although resizing is now explicitly supported, Plasma widget popups no longer respond inappropriately to Maximize and Minimize keyboard shortcuts (Xaver Hugl, and Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26.1).
- Label text can now be selected and copied in the Information Center (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27).
- In the color picker plasmoid, clicking the left mouse button on a color copies it to the clipboard, and also displays a little "Copied!" to help you visually confirm what has occurred (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27).
- Now you get a nice fullscreen blend effect when manually changing Plasma themes (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27).
- The Disks and Devices plasmoid now always shows the "Delete All" item in its hamburger menu when any volume is mounted, not just when more than two are mounted (Jin Liu, Plasma 5.27).
- Discover now shows more permissions for Flatpak apps, such as printer and Bluetooth device access (Jakob Rech, Plasma 5.27).
- Several KDE application windows have been made to rise to the top when launched externally in the Plasma Wayland session: System Preferences when launched from KRunner, Discover when launched from the KMoreTools menus, and Dolphin when launched. active from other applications in general (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.26.1, Frameworks 5.100, and Dolphin 22.12).
Important bug fixes
- System no longer becomes unresponsive after using the "Screen Off" shortcut (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26.1).
- Dragging screens to reorder them on the System Preferences, Display & Monitor page no longer scrolls the view or drags the window instead of moving the screen (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26.1).
- Chrome web apps no longer use the same icon when pinned to an icon-only task manager (Mladen Milinkovic, Plasma 5.26.1).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, when using a multi-screen layout with external screens not being mirrored, the system no longer sometimes sees them as mirrored anyway and inappropriately enables Do Not Disturb mode, and also no longer forgets the on/off status of those screens (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26.1).
- Discover is now significantly better at reporting overall progress information when installing or updating Flatpak applications (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26.1).
- Fixed a regression in Plasma 5.26 with some 5.26.1rd party KWin scripts (David Edmundson, Plasma XNUMX).
- Images that come from a symlink reappear in wallpaper slideshows (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26.1).
- The infamous "Korners" bug has finally been completely fixed. The last problem - light colored dots in the rounded corners of dark panels - is now fixed (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.26.1).
- When using right-aligned icons on the desktop, adding new icons no longer causes all icons in the rightmost column to jump to the leftmost column (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.27).
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 141 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.26.1 will arrive on Tuesday, October 18 and Frameworks 5.100 will be available on November 12. Plasma 5.27 will arrive on February 14 (❤️), but KDE Applications 22.12 does not yet have an official date scheduled.
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: pointieststick.com