They listened to me!... without me telling them anything, in which case and at most they will have read my mind. In plasma 5.25 A new overview was introduced showing desktops above and open windows floating in the center. With this novelty, the one that shows a view of the desktops, although it is not exactly the same, it seems to be useful. Niccolò Venerandi by KDE You must think a little the same, and they are going to introduce changes.
En plasma 6 The overview and desktop grid will be merged into one (header shot), and keyboard gestures will feel natural when switching between states. Keyboard shortcuts will also be updated: Meta+G will show the grid, Meta+W the general view, Meta+Tab will switch between states and Meta+Shift+Tab to change in reverse order.
Other news that will arrive with KDE Plasma 6
- In the Plasma Wayland session, there is now a systray monitor that shows when something is using the camera, just like we already have for screen recording and microphone use (Fushan Wen):
- Floating panels now have nice shadows, and when they stop floating, they no longer have ugly thick margins. Additionally, when the panel is floating, pop-ups that open from it float as well, with nice rounded corners at all sizes. They should have read me, because I did have this complaint and I published it more than a year ago (Niccolò Venerandi).
- There is now a new global shortcut (Meta+Alt+L default) to switch between the current and last used keyboard layout, which can be useful for people who have more than two layouts but usually switch between two of them regularly (Mihail Milev).
- Icons drawn by Kirigami.Icon, which in Plasma 6 are almost all those in KDE's QML software, now look better and sharper when using a fractional scaling factor (Marco Martin).
- Fixed multi-focus issues in System Preferences: it is now possible to focus the sidebar again after focusing the main page, and also pressing the down arrow key in the System Preferences search field now moves focus to list view, which is especially useful after searching for something (Fushan Wen).
- They've started improving the presentation of Flatpak app permissions in Discover, including using better icons, more user-friendly text, and showing the "sound system access" permission, which we'd previously been ignoring (Nate Graham) .
- The setting to enable “offline updates” no longer uses that confusing terminology (Nate Graham):
- The System Monitor and Filelight About pages have been adapted to the new form card style (Carl Schwan).
- For a cleaner, less confusing presentation, the common shortcut choice views now hide local-only columns when all shortcuts are global, just as we already hide global-only columns when all shortcuts are local (Nate Graham ).
- Some fixes have been made to monitor handling that should decrease the chance of the monitor waking up instantly right after being put to sleep (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0).
- When using Plasma's integration with systemd (which is enabled by default when you have systemd), Plasma is now more thorough in killing processes when logged out, which should prevent logout crashes and zombie processes dangling that can prevent logging back in (David Edmundson).
- When using a Panel at the bottom edge of the screen, the tooltips Task Manager that include media controls are no longer sometimes placed in the wrong place (David Edmundson).
- Breeze-themed GTK2 apps no longer look as bad when using a dark theme (Mors Mortium).
- It is now possible to remove a favorite from Kickoff and other launcher menus whose underlying application or file has been removed (Méven Car).
- Page headers in Kirigami-based programs no longer sometimes bypass titles when there is enough space for them when using certain combinations of fonts and font sizes (Ivan Tkachenko).
Correction of minor bugs
- It is no longer possible for the lock screen to break and display the dreaded “lock screen is broken” screen due to QML cache corruption as a result of running out of system space (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.9) .
- Fixed the actual root cause in KDE software for the “ScreenMapping configuration file key getting bigger causing Plasma to crash or crash when launching new applications” issue. And this fix has also allowed us to revert the workaround to limit the number of assignments and solve the problem of icons always being out of order when there were a lot of things on the desktop (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.27.9).
- Fixed several issues with the Discover reviews popup, including it being too slow and sometimes failing to load or submit reviews (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.27.9).
- KMenuEdit correctly recreates .desktop files with exec= keys that point to executable files that have spaces or other special characters in their file paths (Méven Car, Plasma 5.27.9).
- In KRunner and KRunner-powered searches, the search for recent files is once again correctly completely case-insensitive as expected (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.27.9).
- Fixed a complex issue that caused Flatpak-based GNOME applications to display text without any anti-aliasing when running on Plasma (Timothée Ravier, Plasma 5.27.9).
- If a touchscreen calibration matrix has been configured, KWin now respects it (someone going by the pseudonym "The Official GMan", Plasma 5.27.9).
- It is now possible to use the keyboard to focus buttons on the toolbars of KDE applications using the KXMLGui framework (Felix Ernst, Frameworks 5.111).
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 127 bugs.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 5.27.9 will arrive on Tuesday, October 17 if there is no change of plans, Frameworks 111 will arrive on October 13 and there is still no confirmed date about Frameworks 6.0. KDE Gear 24.02 will arrive sometime in February, the same month that Plasma 6 will land. The exact arrival date is not known, but there is a page where they will report about the releases of the next version of the KDE desktop.
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.