Like GNOME hours before them, and like every week for several years now, KDE has published a note with the new features they've made over the last week. In addition to the logical differences between GNOME and KDE, we also find different information: the former tend to publish more recent releases, while the "K team" gives us a sneak peek at what's coming. In other words, these are changes they've already made, but have yet to reach a stable version.
What stands out most this week is that they've improved support for day/night themes. There's an option that allows the operating system to change the theme depending on the time of day. I won't be the one to use this, as it's beyond my control, but the improvements are there. Next up is the list with this week's news.
Notable new features coming to KDE
plasma 6.5.0
- We can now have Plasma automatically switch to a different global theme at night.
- We can now choose which global themes are displayed on the Quick Settings page of System Preferences, and also enable automatic day/night switching from there.
- We can now choose to always display the light or dark variant of wallpapers that include both. There are now enough options for everyone: you can set the background to change dynamically based on the color scheme, the time of day, always light, or always dark.
Notable interface improvements for KDE
plasma 6.4.4
- If you prefer to drag items directly to the panel instead of the Task Manager widget, those panel icons can now be removed from their context menu.
plasma 6.5.0
- On Wayland, files opened from KRunner in an already running application now cause that window to pop up as expected.
- On Wayland, the Orca screen reader now announces changes to the Caps Lock key state.
- The Screen Edges page of System Preferences has been moved to the Display & Monitor group, as it feels more natural to group it with displays rather than the type of input device used to activate its features.
- If the system is configured to hibernate, we can now do so from the SDDM login screen.
- Clicking “Connect” on a network in the Networks pop-up menu now closes all other open password fields, leaving only one visible at a time.
- The sorting and alignment options in the Plasma desktop icon configuration window have been reworked to make it clearer what they do.
Coming soon to your KDE distribution
As for bugs, the 4 high-priority bugs have been maintained, and the 28-minute bugs have been reduced from 23 to 15.
KDE Plasma 6.4.4 is expected to arrive on August 5th and Frameworks 6.17 on August 8th.
Vía: KDE blog.