Some time ago, KDE began separating its bugs into sections. There are normal bugs, high-priority bugs, very high-priority bugs, and also bugs they called "15-minute bugs," annoying bugs that appear shortly after logging in. In that sense, this week they reduced the most important bugs to their lowest number ever, which is expected to significantly improve system stability in the short term.
KDE is also continuing to work on improvements for future Plasma releases. The next release, 6.4, will see a number of UI improvements, and with that section we begin the News list This week.
Interface improvements coming to KDE Plasma 6.4
- Notifications in the history popup now retain their interactive buttons, if they have them. If they don't, but clicking their background normally does something when they're in popup mode, they'll display an "Activate" button when they're in the history.
- On the lock and login screens, the clock and interactive UI elements are now only displayed on one screen at a time when using a multi-screen setup; they fade away on screens without the pointer or keyboard focus, leaving those screens free to display beautiful wallpapers.
- The Display Settings page of System Preferences has been improved; the Display Arrangement view is now hidden when there is only one display, and with more than one, there is a large, clear display selector at the top of the page to make it clear which display is selected, and when a display is disabled but connected.
- The appearance of the Comics widget has been improved when it has not yet been configured with any comics, or when some kind of error has occurred.
- You can now also use Meta+Tab and Meta+Shift+Tab to switch between windows, in addition to the current shortcuts. This supports our push to have all global actions include the Meta key for at least one of their shortcuts.
- KWin’s “Fade Desktop” virtual desktop switching effect now has a customizable duration.
- Plasma notifications now honor requests to play sounds using "soundtracks."
- The Breeze cursor theme for dark cursors is now called “Breeze Dark,” and vice versa for those with light cursors.
Performance and technique
- Massive performance improvement when recording screens in Spectacle using the VP9 video format, which is used by default.
- Implemented support for the wp_fifo_v1 Wayland protocol.
- Implemented support for the Clipboard Portal.
- KWin is more resilient to the problem of windows moving to strange positions when changing the screen layout or number of displays.
As for bugs, they haven't said how many they've fixed, but they do say that There are no longer high priority bugs and “only” 18 of 15 minutes remain.
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.