Right now, users who opt for the Plasma desktop, KDEWe're currently on the 6.3 series at the latest. Many new features arrived in v6.0, and many more up to the most recent, but it seems Plasma 6.4 will take everything much further. This is something we can see with everything they present over the weekends, especially on days like today when they've told us so much interesting stuff.
What follows is the list of the news that have taken place during the last weekHold on, there are curves ahead.
New Features Coming to KDE Plasma 6.4
- Apps that have been recently installed will be marked as such in Kickoff.
- The accessibility feature for using the numeric keypad buttons to move the pointer now works on Wayland.
- Wayland has implemented support for "relative mode" when using a drawing tablet pointer, allowing it to behave more like a mouse held like a pen.
- When the microphone is muted and an application attempts to use it, Plasma will now display an OSD reminding you that it is muted.
- KMenuEdit now allows you to configure applications to always run on the system's discrete GPU, just like the old properties dialog-based UI did.
Interface improvements coming in Plasma 6.4
- System Preferences now has a new Animations page that lets you easily configure the various system-wide animated motion effects that are no longer displayed on the Desktop Effects page.
- The current Desktop Effects page still contains several functional effects that are more than just animated transitions between states, but expect more and more to be phased out from that page over time as we find better places for them.
- You can now switch tabs/sources in the Media Controller widget with the shortcuts Ctrl+Tab and Alt+[number].
- When completing a screen recording in Spectacle is taking a long time for some reason, it now notifies you about this instead of just hanging up until it completes.
- Notification interaction with full-screen apps has been improved. Previously, non-critical notifications were simply suppressed while any full-screen app was open; now, Do Not Disturb mode is automatically activated while a full-screen app has focus. This allows you to reuse existing behaviors around Do Not Disturb mode, including the "you missed some notifications" message. This behavior can be disabled if desired.
- The beautiful Weather Report widget now appears unconfigured in the system tray by default, inviting you to configure it.
- In the panel configuration dialog, the top two toolbar buttons have been combined into one menu so that the dialog doesn't become absurdly large in languages ​​like German.
- Deleting a logged-in user now displays an appropriate warning dialog, and no longer allows you to unsuccessfully attempt to delete their files while they are still logged in.
- A warning is now also displayed when attempting to disable the system clipboard functionality.
- In the Digital Clock widget's calendar popup, the dots indicating the number of events for each day are now positioned above the day numbers so they don't overlap with other UI elements, such as calendar toggles. Additionally, their color better reflects the color of the event they represent.
- The configuration dialogs for the Digital Clock, Dictionary, Timer, and Media Frame widgets have been modernized.
- The Configure and Set buttons on the Digital Clock widget popup are no longer so cramped.
- After closing the Kickoff app launcher while viewing search results or the Places tab, reopening it no longer briefly displays a strange slider animation for content.
- The Discover "reboot to complete this offline update" message has been reworded to reduce the insistent need to restart immediately.
- Discover now respects the chosen web service globally instead of always using DuckDuckGo.
Coming soon to your KDE distribution
As for bugs, this week KDE remains at 1 high priority and 19 of 15 minutes remain.
KDE Plasma 6.3.5 is expected to arrive on Tuesday, May 6th, Plasma 6.4 on June 17th, and Frameworks 6.14 on May 2nd.
Images and content: KDE blog.