KDE it's going to the limit. At its maximum. They do not stop adding improvements and correcting bugs with their sights set on the last day of February, when the "KDE 6 Mega-release" will arrive. That has been precisely the name of Nate Graham's weekly note, and it is that not only will they give us Plasma 6, but KDE will also upgrade to Frameworks 6 and will begin to use Qt6 by default, although only in the system that they control the most (KDE neon). Those responsible for the different distributions will be the ones who will decide what they will include and when.
La feature freeze is coming. That is why they are rushing to add the new, because when the freeze comes, nothing new will be accepted and they will begin to work on compacting what has arrived in time. Among what should be present in Plasma 6 we have two new widgets that replace the current "Battery and brightness": "Energy and battery" and "Brightness and color." The first will be accessed from the battery icon and the second from the night-colored one.
New Features Coming to KDE Plasma 6
- Shutting down or restarting the machine while in the Plasma Wayland session now causes applications with unsaved changes to prompt the user to save them, rather than immediately exiting and losing the changes.
- “Bounce Keys” now works fully in the Plasma Wayland session.
The above two were two of the three reasons why moving to Wayland was not advisable. Another one needs to be corrected.
- Partition Manager no longer allows writing entries to the fstab file that could prevent mounting a partition in the future by closing the partition editing dialog without changing the mount point, when the mount point was not previously defined.
- Files and folders created in ~/Desktop but outside of Plasma should now always appear there immediately.
- When changing the user image in System Preferences, the Kickoff image now changes immediately, instead of only after restarting Plasma.
- Fixed a visual bug in Kate and other KTextEditor-based applications that affected the completion popup.
- Since the Plasma widget API has changed in Plasma 6, widgets that migrate from a Plasma 5 installation but are not supported in Plasma 6 are now displayed in a relatively user-friendly way, so that we at least know what do and let's not think that Plasma 6 is totally broken.
- When an offline update has been downloaded, there is now an option to reboot without applying it at the next boot. KDE is considering adding this option on shutdown as well.
- The “Battery & Brightness” widget has been split into two new widgets: “Brightness & Color” and “Power & Battery”. The first integrates controls for Night Color, so in the end the total number of widgets in the System Tray is not increasing; They are simply now better organized and more relevant:
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- Brightness and color
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- Power and battery
- KMail now supports the borderless style of the Breeze theme for Plasma 6:
- The dialog for killing an unresponsive window now exists in Plasma Wayland and has received visual improvements:
- Spectacle now opens with GOAL+Shift+S, for those who cannot open it with the print screen key.
- The welcome center now has a dedicated page for those using the beta version of Plasma.
- Samba setup now uses Qt6.
As for bugs, this week a total of 221 have been corrected.
When will all this come
plasma 5.27.10 will arrive on December 10, Frameworks 113 will arrive in the second week of the same month and on February 28, 2024, Plasma 6, KDE Frameworks 6 and KDE Gear 24.02.0 will arrive.
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.