KDE has published its note on the new features they're preparing for Plasma. Even without including application updates—those go into other articles—and even though we don't add bugs to our lists, this week's update contains quite a bit of information. Many changes will be coming in Plasma 6.4, most of them, but there are also some that will be released in Plasma 6.3.4, the next minor update to the 6.3 series in which in theory only minor changes are possible to improve what already exists.
Plasma 6.4 will introduce a handful of visual improvements, like one I'm used to seeing on my Windows virtual machine: it will be possible to view the progress of transfers, for example when copying a file to another folder or drive, in a graph. This will let us know how fast it's doing. But let's take it step by step. What's coming next is the list with this week's news.
New features coming with KDE Plasma 6.4
- After being removed from Plasma 6.3, custom tile layouts for each virtual desktop are now implemented in version 6.4.
- Clicking the "Details" button in a system notification showing file transfer progress now displays a graph showing the transfer speed over time.
- System tray icons provided by applications that lack an internal setting for this can now be completely disabled.
KDE interface improvements
plasma 6.3.4
- Plasma UI elements styled as sidebars (e.g., the activity switcher sidebar) now overlap panels when displayed outside of edit mode. This looks more pleasing and helps better communicate focus.
plasma 6.4.0
- KRunner's search results sorting has been improved by adding Power and Session actions to the default set of favorite actions, ensuring they appear first when searched.
- The heuristics for determining when a dashboard widget's popup will be displayed centered on the dashboard or screen have been refined so that it occurs more often in cases where the dashboard has obviously been configured with this in mind.
- In the panel configuration dialog, the small option displays now visually reflect the actual position of the panel on the screen.
- You can now configure which modifier keys plus a shift key trigger the KWin zoom effect.
- Improved keyboard navigation in the KRunner popup: If the pointer hovers over an item, you can now still use the arrow keys to move the selection highlight to a different item.
- If you're slowly getting annoyed by the system notification that tells you how to regain control when an app like Input Leap is using your input devices, you can now disable it just like any other notification.
- Plasma widgets in the system tray that are completely hidden when not considered relevant no longer do so when placed independently on the panel.
- Widgets that use the ExpandableListItem component—which typically appear in the system tray—now display tooltips when hovering over list items with labels so long they have been elided.
- Once we've configured the Kickoff app launcher to only show app names or only show app descriptions, we'll no longer see tooltips with the labels we said we didn't want.
Framework 6.13
- Implemented touch scrolling in open/save dialogs.
- Improved the sorting of KRunner search results in another way as well, returning to the previous style of strictly respecting the sorting the user configured.
As for bugs, this week A total of 98 bugs have been fixed.
KDE Plasma 6.3.4 is expected to arrive on Tuesday, April 1st, Plasma 6.4 on June 17th, and Frameworks 6.13 on April 11th.
Images and content: KDE blog.