KDE has entered 2023 doing what it does best: improving its software with new features, interface tweaks, and bug fixes. According to Nate Graham, this week they have made a lot of improvements to the latter, to the UI, although many of them will go unnoticed by some users. Most of them will arrive already in Plasma 5.27, since 5.26 has reached the end of its life cycle earlier this week.
Related to KDE, NeoChat has arrived this week at Microsoft Store, with which Windows users will be able to chat with this Matrix client by installing it from the official store. This version has end-to-end encryption enabled by default. The rest of new arrivals published this week is completed by the following list.
New Features Coming to KDE
- In KolourPaint, you can now choose the quality level when saving an image in the AVIF, HEIF, and HEIC file formats (Nate Graham, KolourPaint 23.04).
- In the Media Player widget, it is now possible to swipe up/down to change the volume, and left/right to change the playback position (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27).
Improvements in the user's interface
- Elisa now includes some of the most popular radio stations by default (Someone with the pseudonym "fanick1", Elisa 23.04).
- The System Preferences Shortcuts page now features a much more obvious and useful user interface for adding custom commands (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27):
- The "Startup Feedback" page in System Preferences is no more, and everything on it has been moved to a popup window accessible from the Cursors page, with an actual explanation of what the settings do (Fushan Wen and Janet Blackquill , Plasma 5.27):
- The “Highlight Changed Settings” button, currently located in the footer of the System Preferences sidebar, has been moved to the hamburger menu to simplify the user interface (Alexander Wilms, Plasma 5.27).
- When pasting links into a Notes widget using the standard Paste action, they are now pasted as clickable links by default. And if we want to remove the formatting, there is also a new item in the context menu. (Martin Frueh, Plasma 5.27).
- A single window can now be moved to another activity using the title bar context menu (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27).
- In Touch Mode, the global Edit Mode toolbar now also allows you to open the entire desktop context menu, so nothing there is totally inaccessible when using a touch device (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27) .
- The standard set of Home/End/PageUp/PageDown navigation keys now works as expected in the Clipboard widget list view (Tom Warnke, Plasma 5.27).
- Kickoff now shows the tabs added in KMenuEdit (Sergey Katunin, Plasma 5.27):
- On a very small screen, Kickoff now switches to a more compact design so as not to take up all of the screen space while open (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27).
- Pasting a full file path into the directory chooser field of an Open dialog instead of the file path field now opens the file, as you probably wanted it to (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.102).
Correction of minor bugs
- It is now possible to set a manual activation time for Color Night after 19:00 (Martin Frueh, Plasma 5.26.5, available since last Tuesday).
- Windows activated by other applications that are on a different virtual desktop no longer move between virtual desktops, unless specifically configured to do so in System Settings (Nicolas Fella, 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 133 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27 will arrive on February 14, while Frameworks 102 (the latest version of KF5) should arrive later today. KDE Applications 23.04 is only known to 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.