It's been quite some time since development of Plasma 6 began. This is how Nate Graham has been telling us in his personal blog over the weekends, but what he has said today is something different: he is already using it, and he says that it is still raw (or rough, or hard), but usable. He is not using it on his production machine, but in a dev session, and it is unlikely to be the only component of KDE let him do it.
The jump to 6 will be big. It's going to be a triple somersault, figuratively speaking, since they're going up to the sixes of Qt, Plasma, and Frameworks, so they decided to take a bit more time. To be completely honest, I don't know if it's something they did going up to 5, but the normal time should have been 4 months since 5.27 and for the next version it will be 8 months. Explained all this, let's go with the new arrivals which has advanced today.
New Features Coming to KDE
- When Dolphin is in split view mode, there are now context menu items and keyboard shortcuts that allow you to quickly move or copy items to the opposite view (Méven Car, Dolphin 23.08).
- Links in open files are now clickable in Kate. This requires the “Open Link” plugin to be activated manually, which comes by default but is left disabled (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 23.08).
Improvements in the user's interface
- Partition Manager finally has its own icon, instead of reusing the one from Filelight (Gerson Alvarado, Partition Manager 23.08 and Frameworks 5.106):
- Filelight's default window size is no longer too large to fully fit a 1366x768 screen (Nate Graham, Filelight 23.04)
- Dolphin once again tries to explain what to do instead of running it with sudo (Nate Graham, Dolphin 23.04):
- Improved RTL layout and focus indicator lines on various types of Breeze-themed buttons, checkboxes, and radio buttons (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27.4).
- Scrolling in the Task Manager and Locator widgets now works more reliably when scrolling sometimes with a trackpad and sometimes with the mouse wheel (Prajna Sariputra, Plasma 5.27.5).
- You can now tap and hold with a touchscreen to open a context menu for system tray icons (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.5)
- Now, when scrolling through the Audio Volume, Media Player, and Battery & Brightness widgets, the volume and brightness always go up or down based on the scrolling direction, instead of respecting the natural/inverted scrolling direction setting ( Vlad Zahorodnii and Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0).
- Streamlined the appearance of the “Cool Plasma Features” pages in the Welcome Center (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.0):
- When displaying the logoff screen by pressing the power button or Ctrl+Alt+Delete, the action "Shutdown" is now pre-selected by default, instead of "Logout" (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0).
Correction of minor bugs
- Fixed a way that Okular could crash when trying to save changes made after filling out forms in a document (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 23.04).
- When using Elisa in a language other than English, the "Play" and "Add to Playlist" buttons on the overlay now work immediately on launch (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 23.04).
- Fixed a complex multi-monitor bug involving incorrect behavior with KVM/headless setups that could sometimes lead people to fix the issue by purchasing and using a bi-directional EDID emulator widget (Kai Li, Plasma 5.27.5).
- Fixed a recent regression in the size and sharpness of the minimize, maximize, and close buttons of GTK CSD windows when no scaling is used (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.5).
- System Monitor sensors that use the unit "watt-hour" now display the unit correctly (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.27.5).
- On the Networking page of the Information Center, the Update button now works (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.5).
- Dragging from empty areas of the toolbar in Discover and many other Kirigami-based applications now always works, instead of only working on some pages/views and not others (Marco Martin, Kirigami 5.106).
- Fixed one of the main causes of the infamous Dolphin bug where folders were not updated in real time when their content was changed in another application (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.106).
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 99 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.5 will arrive on May 9th, KDE Frameworks 106 should arrive on the 13th of the same month and there is no confirmed date on Frameworks 6.0. KDE Gear 23.04 will be available from April 20, 23.08 will arrive in August, and Plasma 6 will arrive in the second half of 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.