This week, KDE He launched plasma 5.24, the new version of its graphic environment that succeeds the 25th anniversary version. The project is satisfied with the work done, and it is that 5.23 coincided with the date, but it is in 5.24 where more interesting functions have arrived at the same time that things have been polished a little more. But life goes on, and Nate Graham posted A few hours ago a new article from This Week in KDE advancing us everything they are working on.
To the usual sections, for a few weeks they have added one: that of the 15-minute bugs. In this section, the number of bugs has remained at 83 for two weeks, but bugs are being corrected, so it seems that they fix exactly the same number of errors that they find during the week. The news they are working on and will arrive in the short-medium term are the following.
15 minute bugs fixed
The list is in this link. What has been corrected this week has been:
- In Plasma Wayland session, panels no longer randomly freeze, especially after login (Vlad Zahorodnii, and it will come as soon as our distro updates its Qt patch collection to include this patch).
- Closing the laptop lid when an external monitor is attached no longer causes the computer to go to sleep inappropriately when the setting to disable this has been used (no mention of the author, now fixed in Plasma 5.24).
New Features Coming to KDE
- Konsole now supports Sixel, allowing you to display .sixel images right inside the window (header image, Matan Ziv-Av, Konsole 22.04).
- Konsole now has a new plugin that stores the saved commands and chunks of text for us (Tao Guo, Konsole 22.04).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- When using Kate's function to store and restore unsaved changes to files opened when closing the application, those changes are now actually saved as expected instead of being silently destroyed if the application is exited using the "Exit" action. » or the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Q instead of clicking the window close button (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.12.3).
- Canceling an archive job in progress now automatically deletes the temporary archive that was being created (Méven Car, Ark 22.04).
- Konsole's text reflow feature now works for lines of text that do not have whitespace or newline characters (Luis Javier Merino Morán, Konsole 22.04).
- System Preferences no longer crashes when the active color scheme does not exist on disk for some reason; it now reverts to Breeze Light (the default color scheme) and does not crash (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.24.1).
- In the Plasma Wayland session:
- Plasma no longer always crashes when screencasting in certain circumstances (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24.1).
- Using custom splash screens works again (Linus Dierheimer, Plasma 5.24.1)
- Fixed a way the tooltip could be mispositioned (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.1).
- The scaling effect is again configurable (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.1).
- Links to System Preferences pages that are added to the desktop via the "Add to Desktop" context menu item in Kickoff reappear on the desktop as expected (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.1).
- Some large button types with text no longer make their middle text invisible when keyboard-focused (Ingo Klöcker, Plasma 5.24.1).
- The Information Center "Devices" page works as expected again if the lspci command line program is located in /sbin/, /usr/sbin or /usr/local/sbin on our computer (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.24.1).
- Dragging files from the desktop onto a Sticky Note applet no longer causes the files to temporarily disappear (Severin von Wnuck, Plasma 5.24.1).
- In the X11 Plasma session, the cursor no longer disappears when using the "Zoom" effect (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.1).
- The "Fall Apart" effect works again and no longer interacts strangely with the "Overview" effect (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.1).
- Overview effect no longer inappropriately displays minimized windows on desktop thumbnails for a moment before immediately hiding them again (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.1).
- When using certain third-party window decoration themes, maximizing a window no longer unexpectedly scrambles instead (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.1).
- System Preferences is now faster, especially when using icon view mode (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.1).
- Dolphin no longer crashes when closing the "Create New File" dialog on a remote location (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.92).
- Fixed a memory leak when canceling move/copy files (etc) jobs in progress (David Faure, Frameworks 5.92).
- Scrolling views with text in QtQuick-based software no longer have visual issues with text being cut off or squashed at the top or bottom when the view scrolls very slowly one pixel at a time (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.92).
- Font changes now take effect instantly in QtQuick-based applications (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.92).
- Buttons in System Tray applets that open Info Center pages now work if you don't have Info Center installed; instead, they open the requested page in a separate window (Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.92).
- All QtQuick-based applications now use slightly less CPU resources (Aleix Pol González, Frameworks 5.92).
Improvements in the user's interface
- When an app is installed more than once from different sources (for example, one version from the distro's repositories and another version from Flatpak), that app's context menu in Kickoff no longer has multiple entries saying "Uninstall or manage plugins” (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.1).
- Searching for apps that are not yet installed no longer returns duplicate entries for matching apps that are available from multiple sources (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.1).
- In the overview effect, the selection highlight effects of apps now disappear when you start dragging them (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24.1).
- The System Quick Settings page has received some improvements to the alignment and spacing of its elements and the clarity of its labels (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25).
- Kate, KDevelop, and other KTextEditor-based applications now do a much better job of differentiating open files in tabs that have the same filename (Waqar Ahmed, Frameworks 5.92).
- Dragging a file or folder over an item in the Places panel now causes that location to open and show up in the main view so we can drag the thing into a folder within it. And if the Places panel item we dragged it onto was an unmounted disk, it now automatically mounts first (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.92).
- Errors in open/save dialogs are now shown inline like in Dolphin, instead of with a separate dialog window (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.92).
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.24.1 will arrive on February 15, and KDE Frameworks 5.92 will do so on March 12. Plasma 5.25 will arrive on June 14. Gear 21.12.3 will be available from March 3, and KDE Gear 22.04 on April 21.
To enjoy all this as soon as possible we have to add the repository backports from KDE 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.