Users KDE We're not usually dissatisfied with everything the Kool Desktop Environment offers, but additions like the one they teased today make it clear that not everyone is so happy, or not so soon. Just a few moments ago, they teased an improvement that had been requested no less than 22 years ago. The good thing about all this is that it shows that KDE is responsive, that it doesn't let things fall by the wayside. Or not forever.
The new feature I'm talking about is that it will soon be possible to save or pin items to the clipboard widget that appears on the KDE desktop when you press META + V. As you can see in the header screenshot, if there's something you paste a lot and want to keep track of, the future version of the widget will make your life much easier. The following is the list with news they posted this week.
Notable New Features Coming to KDE
- The Plasma clipboard now allows you to mark entries as favorites, and they'll be saved permanently so you can always access them easily. This is very useful when you find yourself pasting the same common snippets of text all the time. This feature has been requested for 22 years.
- Plasma now allows you to configure touch rings on our drawing tablet.
- Discover now supports installing hardware drivers offered in the operating system package repositories.
- KRunner and KRunner-powered searches can now find global shortcuts.
Notable improvements to the KDE user interface
plasma 6.5.0
- KRunner and KRunner-powered searches now use fuzzy matching for applications.
- The way Discover presents error messages has been improved to make them more user-friendly and compliant with the KDE Human Interface Guidelines.
- Discover now allows you to write a review for apps that don't yet have one.
- On operating systems that use RPM-OSTree (such as Fedora Kinoite), an awkward red icon is no longer used in the sidebar and other places where black or white icons would be expected.
KDE Gear 25.12.0
- Opening a disk in KDE Partition Manager from its entry in the Plasma Disks and Devices widget no longer mounts the disk, which was annoying since you then had to unmount it in the application before you could do anything with it.
Performance and Technical Highlights
plasma 6.5.0
- Support for overlay planes has been implemented in single-output configurations, which has the potential to significantly reduce GPU and power usage for compatible applications that display full-screen content. It's worth noting that NVIDIA GPUs are currently excluded due to unresolved driver issues.
- Support for dragging and dropping to and from popups created by Firefox extensions has been implemented, and presumably other popups implemented with the same xdg_popup system as well.
- Fixed an issue that caused V-Sync to be disabled inappropriately in certain games using the SDL library.
Spectacle upgrade with no estimated date
KDE is preparing an improvement to Spectacle but cannot provide an estimated release date. It's the Spectacle markup or annotation tool, which has been extracted and will be usable in other applications. The integration is currently a work in progress. More information will be available in the coming weeks, but it looks very promising. In fact, many years ago I used Shutter (archive article) just for its annotation tool. I currently use Gwenview, which is similar to Spectacle and also KDE, but having something like this in any other app can be very useful.
Coming soon to your KDE distribution
As for bugs, the number of high-priority bugs has dropped from 5 to 4, and the number of 27-minute bugs has also dropped from 26 to 15.
KDE Plasma 6.4.5 is expected to arrive on September 9th and Frameworks 6.18 on September 12th.
VÃa: KDE blog.