KDE don't slow down. Behind the Plasma 5.24 release and first maintenance update, the K-team is still looking to the present to fix existing bugs, but they have already put in a brave work on Plasma 5.25 and KDE Gear 22.04. This has been communicated by Nate Graham in your article today on This Week on KDE, titled "Oh, So Many Things." Among them there are several 15-minute bugs listed, but the count has dropped from 83 to 82. This is not the best of news, because it means that they are finding practically the same number of bugs as those that are being corrected.
All the 15-minute bugs you mentioned today were fixed in Plasma 5.24.1 released this past Tuesday, so we won't include them in the long list below. Among the new functions, I would highlight that color schemes can be used that will even modify the top bar of Plasma applications. The full list of news (minus the 15 minute bugs and other bugs fixed in Plasma 5.24.1) is as follows.
New Features Coming to KDE
- Kate now has an interactive path-based navigation bar that shows the folder hierarchy of the currently open document and allows you to change it to another (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 22.04).
- Color schemes can now be optionally set to apply their accent color to window title bars or even the entire header area, and the "Breeze Classic" color scheme now uses this feature (Dominic Hayes, Plasma 5.25).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- Dolphin's view no longer has visual bugs when zooming in and out (Eugene Popov, Dolphin 22.04).
- Title/header text in menus no longer gets cut off in cases where it is longer than the text of any of the other menu items (Albert Astals Cid, Plasma 5.24.2).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, fixed one of the ways the virtual keyboard could not appear as expected despite being configured correctly (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.2).
- In the X11 session of Plasma, when the overview effect is set to appear on Meta key press, it can no longer be inappropriately triggered from the lock screen (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24.2).
- Plasma no longer sometimes crashes when copying certain text to the clipboard (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.92).
- Installing OBS Studio from Spectacle's "install a screen recorder" feature now works (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.92).
- Kirigami applications that use side drawers no longer eat mouse events on the sides of the window, meaning that, in particular, their rightmost scrollbars now work correctly (Tranter Madi, Frameworks 5.92).
- Fixed a memory leak in KDE applications using the Solid framework (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.92).
Improvements in the user's interface
- Gwenview has a "Fill" button in its status bar again (Felix Ernst, Gwenview 22.04).
- The notifications that Ark sends when a compression job has finished are now more elegant and useful (Nicolas Fella, Ark 22.04).
- Spectacle's dark overlay in Rectangular Region mode is now darker (Nate Graham, Spectacle 22.04).
- The Show Desktop applet now has an indicator line that appears when the desktop is being displayed just like the Minimize All applet, and the Minimize All applet's line now touches the edge of the panel regardless of its internal margins (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.2. two).
- Card/tile views in Breeze-themes GTK apps now look much better (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25).
- Audio volume/record level indicators now look much better (Light Yagami, Plasma 5.25).
- The Firewall page of System Preferences now uses a simplified rule entry interface by default, so you don't need to know port numbers and all that gibberish, but if you want, you can display all the complicated advanced controls ( Lucas Biaggi and Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25).
- Breeze-themed menus in Qt and GTK applications now have a little outer fringe, which is not only pretty, but also resolves an old usability bug with the top item being too easy to accidentally activate (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25 ).
- Qt theme menus that are taller than screen height now scroll vertically instead of expanding horizontally into more columns (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25).
- Tasks in Task Manager can now be tapped and held to display a context menu, making their menus accessible on a touch screen (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25).
- The notification displayed when trying to use a VPN whose supporting software has not been installed is now more useful and understandable and persists until explicitly dismissed (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.25)
- To improve the discoverability of the KCommandBar, the "Help" menu of every KDE application now has a "Find Action" item that will be activated on click (Waqar Ahmed, Frameworks 5.92).
- Clicking the "Custom" accent color option to display a color selection dialog now opens the dialog showing the current accent color, if one has already been set (Yari Polla, Plasma 5.25).
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.24.2 will arrive on February 22, 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.