Anyone who wants to see the glass half empty can, and the same for anyone who prefers to be optimistic and see the glass half full. During the last week in KDE, its developers and collaborators have seen how the total number of Plasma 6 problems has increased, and this would be the glass half empty, but they have managed to correct important and long-lasting problems that have been present in Plasma 5 in what would be the glass half full.
The article published this week only has two sections, that of Plasma 6 and that of correcting errors of some importance. The number of open problems now amounts to 90, but the new ones are not important and the overall balance is positive for its developers. The News list The last seven days mainly include corrections, and that is what you have below.
News coming to KDE Plasma 6
- Fixed the infamous panel visual freezing issue in Plasma Wayland session when using a non-Intel GPU in conjunction with the basic QtQuick render loop and Task Manager previews enabled (David Edmundson et al) .
- Searching for apps, System Preferences pages, and other items internally classified as "services" in KRunner and other KRunner-based search tools (such as Kickoff) now also match English text when using the system in a language that It is not English (Alexander Lohnau).
- When using an icon-only Task Manager in a row, the last open task in the row is no longer sometimes missing under certain circumstances (Marco Martin).
- Fixed a bug that could cause auto-starting applications with icons in the system tray to sometimes not display their icons in the system tray as expected until they were manually closed and restarted (David Edmundson).
- Fixed several cursor crashes when using rotated screens in the Plasma Wayland session on a GPU that supports hardware cursors (Xaver Hugl).
- The “Manually lock power off and screen lock” switches of various battery and brightness widgets are now synchronized; When one is activated, they all change too (Natalie Clarius).
- Repeated messages on the lock screen now bounce a little, instead of bunching up and repeating themselves (Nate Graham).
- Reduced resource usage in QtQuick applications that have mnemonics, those little underlines under letters when you hold down the Alt key (Kai Uwe Broulik).
- The menu item that says “Enter Output Mode” now changes to “Exit Edit Mode” when you are already in Edit Mode (Nate Graham).
- The Kirigami.BasicListItem component has been deprecated with a planned removal in KF6, because it was too slow, heavy, and inflexible, worsening performance in QtQuick applications that used many of them. In their place is a new set of lightweight components that are thin wrappers around the standard Qt ItemDelegate, CheckDelegate etc. components, plus some more basic building blocks for making custom list items. This provides most of the convenience of BasicListItem, without the performance overhead (Arjen Hiemstra).
Correction of minor bugs
- Gwenview now displays images more correctly when using a fractional scaling factor in the Plasma Wayland session (Kai Uwe Broulik, Gwenview 24.02).
- Fixed multiple bugs in Elisa that could cause strange and incorrect behavior when rearranging playlist content around the currently playing song (Jack Hill, Elisa 24.02).
- Filelight again honors settings regarding folder exclusions and file system limits (Yifan Zhu, Filelight 23.08.2).
- When closing a document in Kate and KWrite that has unsaved changes, you will no longer see two dialogs asking if you want to save them (Kai Uwe Broulik, Kate and KWrite 23.08.2).
- Widgets using the standard Plasma Calendar integration will no longer sometimes display holidays from the default region, instead of the selected one (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.27.9).
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 121 bugs.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.9 will arrive on Tuesday, October 17 if there is no change of plans, Frameworks 111 will arrive on October 13 and there is still no confirmed date about Frameworks 6.0. KDE Gear 24.02 will arrive sometime in February, the same month that Plasma 6 will land. The exact arrival date is not known, but there is a page where they will report about the releases of the next version of the KDE desktop.
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.