Last week there was no this week's article in KDE, but for a good reason. The team went to Berlin to talk about the future Plasma 6, and there will be many important news. To learn more about them, I recommend reading the article on our sister blog Linux Adictos, which also links to the original article published by Nate Graham himself, who publishes the weekly notes on news in KDE.
In short, what was discussed in Berlin is that everything will open with a double click, and not with one, Wayland will be used By default, or that's the intention, the floating panel will also be used by default, partly to differentiate itself from Windows 11, another app switcher, some other tweaks, and move to two Plasma releases a year, so Kubuntu can always use the latest version of your graphical environment in the same way that Ubuntu does with GNOME.
Among the changes that Graham has advanced to us today, Friday, and not Saturday as usual, there are many that arrived in the Plasma 5.27.5 which was released this Tuesday. After hesitating for a while, I've decided not to add them all to this article, which will make it easier to read. Who wants to see everything, at the end of the article we will link to the original content.
New Features Coming to KDE
- Kate now supports the Godot engine language server protocol (Michael Alexsander, Kate 23.04).
- In Okular, it is now possible to copy the text of an annotation to the clipboard using the context menu of the annotation entry in the annotations sidebar list (Kai Uwe Broulik, Okular 23.04).
- There is now a new kinfo command that can be run to dump the version numbers of various software components on the command line, which can be useful for debugging and reporting bugs. It displays the same information that appears on the "About this system" page of the Information Center (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.5):
- To save power, while the screen is locked, monitors now turn off sooner than when unlocked. This is configurable and defaults to 60 seconds (Méven Car, Plasma 6.0).
- You can now middle-click a colored circle in the Plasma Color Picker widget to copy the color code text to the clipboard (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0).
- You can now hold Shift while adjusting the volume using a global shortcut or by hovering over the Audio Volume widget to adjust it in 1% increments for finer control (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0).
Improvements in the user's interface
- In Spectacle annotations, it's now just as easy as it was in version 22.12 to draw a shape with an outline but no fill, for example, to draw a perfect circle around something to draw attention to it (Noah Davis, Spectacle 23.04.1. XNUMX).
- Scrolling performance in Elisa when there are many songs in the playlist has been significantly improved (Nicolas Fella, Elisa 23.04.1).
- Dragging the volume slider in Elisa now displays a tooltip indicating its current level (Jack Hill, Elisa 23.08):
- Discover now tries harder to point in the first direction when there is an update issue (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0):
- When switching Virtual Desktops in the Panorama effect by clicking one of them in the strip at the top, it will now switch to that desktop within the Panorama effect itself, and will not close immediately (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0)
- When viewing a connected network's QR code, it now appears online in the widget, instead of a giant full-screen overlay (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.0).
- In the Breeze Icons theme, the small monochrome versions of the "MS DOS Executable" icons now respect the active color scheme (Michael Alexander, Frameworks 5.106).
- Icons displayed in the display settings widget and in the OSD now have consistent stroke widths and detail levels (Nate Graham and Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.106).
Correction of minor bugs
- In Okular, it is now possible to "Save As..." when the document has been externally modified or deleted, so you can avoid losing any unsaved changes (Nate Graham, Okular 23.04.1).
- In the Plasma Wayland session:
- Basic sticky keys functionality now works (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0).
- Kinetic scrolling in GTK now works (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0).
- Searching for the clipboard content in KRunner with the shortcut Alt+Shift+F2 now works (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.0).
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 199 bugs have been fixed.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.5 arrived on May 9th, KDE Frameworks 106 should arrive tomorrow the 13th and there is no confirmed date on Frameworks 6.0. KDE Gear 23.04.1 is available from yesterday May 11, 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.