KDE continues to work on improving its software, with future versions of Plasma as the main focus. The project still believes they have some work to do, something they haven't mentioned recently, but the most telling sign has yet to emerge: when they'll start releasing only two versions of Plasma per year. For now, they're continuing with internal and external improvements, as they have in recent years, and just a few moments ago, they published a note with the week's news.
The following News list includes changes for Plasma 6.5.0 almost entirely. And the fact is that the 6.4 series is now available, and what remains at hand is to fix its flaws. KDE is already looking to the future.
New Features Coming to KDE Plasma 6.5.0
- Windows styled with Breeze now automatically have rounded bottom corners thanks to KWin (header image). This feature is enabled by default, but you can disable it if you prefer the previous style.
User interface improvements coming to KDE
plasma 6.5.0
- The sidebars in Discover and System Monitor are now resizable. They also remember the size chosen in the status configuration file, not the settings configuration file.
- The Disks and Devices widget now allows you to mount a disk without checking for errors, or manually check for errors without mounting. This can be useful for large disks full of content that you know is fine, and which otherwise take a long time to verify upon mounting.
- They've started a project to improve the ordering of search results in KRunner. Changes made so far include not increasing the priority of KDE apps or favorited items, as this tended to make the results appear more random. More changes will follow; this isn't the end.
- The Plasma Weather Report widget now retrieves weather data immediately upon waking from sleep, if the device has been asleep for more than 30 minutes.
- When you start creating a user on the Users page of System Preferences, there is now a “Cancel” button that you can click to easily stop the process and go back.
Gear 25.08.0
- In the Plasma Disks and Devices widget, optical disks no longer show the option to open in the Partition Manager, because it doesn't make sense.
Framework 6.17
- The NavigationTabButton component—used in several System Settings pages as well as in several QtQuick-based applications—now uses more obvious styling to communicate keyboard focus, improving accessibility.
Technical and performance related to KDE
plasma 6.5.0
- They've added more automated tests to verify Plasma's ability to charge various parts of it.
- They've made KWin less reliant on colorimetry information from the displays' EDID, as it's often incorrect and doesn't make sense to use it by default.
- File dialog window size data is now stored in the state configuration file, not the settings file.
Coming soon to your KDE distribution
As for bugs, the 4 high-priority bugs have been maintained, and the 31-minute bugs have been raised from 32 to 15.
KDE Plasma 6.4.4 is expected to arrive on August 5th and Frameworks 6.17 on August 8th.
Vía: KDE blog.