Welcome screen in Kate, more mentions of Plasma 5.27 and other news this week at KDE

No, we don't forget. Last week there was no article about what's new in KDE because the project was celebrating Akademy 2022. They didn't stop working, but Nate Graham couldn't post anything. Back to normal, the this week's article It arrives with many new features, although more were expected considering that there has been a break, but at least there is something that attracts attention above everything else.

What attracts attention is not a specific function or change. What draws a little attention is that they have already begun to really talk about the news that will come from the hand of Plasma 5.27. We're currently on the 5.25 series, with 5.26 coming soon, so this time had to come one of these weeks. Next you have the News list that Graham has considered that they stand out above the rest to the point of publishing them in his week note.

What's New Coming Soon to KDE

• New application comes to the KDE family: Ghost. It is an application to write texts with support for marks.
• Ark now supports ARJ files (Ilya Pominov, Ark 22.12).
• Kate and KWrite now show a splash screen when launched without opening any files (Eric Armbruster and Christoph Cullman, Kate and KWrite 22.12).

User interface improvements

• In Dolphin, dragging and dropping a folder onto an empty area of ​​the tab bar now opens it in a new tab (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.12).
• The animation of the desktop swipe effect has been made a bit faster, due to popular demand (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26).
• In the “new connected display” selector OSD, choosing “Extend Left” now causes the new display to extend to the left, and extends from the current parent display (Allan Sandfield Jensen, Plasma 5.26).
• On the Colors page of System Preferences, clicking the “From Accent Color” option now updates the preview immediately to show the accent color to use (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 5.26).
• When transferring files via Bluetooth, the progress notification now shows more detailed and useful information (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.26).
• Uninstalling an app now removes its icon from the Kickoff app launcher favorites list/grid immediately (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.27).
• Picture of the Day wallpapers now have a nice cross-transition animation when switching from one picture to another, or to a different type of Picture of the Day (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27).
• The Breeze Window Decoration theme setting to still display maximized and tiled window borders has been reworded for clarity (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27).
• The Media Frame widget's “Show/Hide Background” setting now uses the standard UI for it, with a button on its edit mode toolbar (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27).
• When replying to a text message using the KDE Connect plasmoid, the text field is now inline instead of in a separate dialog window (Bharadwaj Raju, KDE Connect 22.12).
• When a removable device is unmounted in Dolphin, its eject button now turns into a busy indicator so you know when it's safe to physically disconnect it (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.100).

Important bug fixes

• Switching between global themes that include your own desktop layouts no longer sometimes causes Plasma to crash and panels to be lost (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.24.7).
• System Preferences no longer sometimes crashes when exiting the Thunderbolt page (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24.7).
• In the Users page of System Preferences, it is again possible to change the user's password and nothing else when using a recent version of the AccountsService library (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.24.7).
• In Plasma's X11 session, when repeated graphic crashes cause KWin to disable compositing, it will now periodically check if it's better, and if it is, it will re-enable compositing so we don't have to do it manually or lose compositing forever if we don't know what to do (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.26).
• Grid items in the application control panel now have two lines of text, so you can read longer labels (Tomáš Hnyk, Plasma 5.26).
• In the X11 Plasma session, when KWin crashes and is automatically restarted -or manually restarted- it no longer loses its assignment of windows to Activities (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.26).
• Fixed an issue that could occasionally cause apps like VLC and Firefox to stop updating after being used for a while (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26).
• In the Networks plasmoid, networks no longer jump and rearrange themselves while you try to connect to one or enter your password (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26).
• Discover and other applications that can display animated images no longer freeze when displaying certain PCX images (Aleix Pol González, Frameworks 5.99).
• Various System Monitor graphics no longer flicker, stutter, or freeze when using an NVIDIA GPU (Łukasz Wojniłowicz, Frameworks 5.100).

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. The list of high priority bugs has been lowered from 11 to 8.

When will this all come to KDE?

Plasma 5.26 will arrive on Tuesday, October 11, Frameworks 5.99 will be available throughout today and KDE Gear 22.08.2 next Thursday the 13th. Frameworks 5.100 will arrive on November 12th. Plasma 5.27 and KDE Applications 22.12 do not yet have an official release date scheduled.

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.