If you look at the weekly notes that Nate Graham publishes on the official blog of KDE, we can assume that the upcoming Plasma 6.4 will be a version with many interesting new features. There's still time before it's released and the official release notes are published, but I'm sure the wait will be worth it. We also have to pay attention to the present, and the KDE development team continues to refine the 6.3 series.
What comes next is the list with news that have happened this week in the KDE universe. As we've explained on several occasions, we're not including the fixed bugs in this article to keep it short. Anyone who wants to know more can visit the link provided at the end of this post.
New KDE Features
plasma 6.4.0
- The System Monitor Applications page now groups background services into a new "Background Services" section so you can see at a glance how non-application parts of the system are using resources without having to switch pages (header image).
- The Bluetooth widget can now be configured to display a badge with the number of connected devices.
Framework 6.14
- KRunner now understands some archaic units such as furlongs and yards, so it can convert them to more modern units.
KDE User Interface Improvements
plasma 6.3.5
- When adding a new printer, you're now immediately offered the option to set it as the default printer, even if it's the only one added so far. This way, you can add another printer, but we'll want the first one to be the default.
plasma 6.4.0
- The Drawing Tablet page in System Settings now displays a visualization of the stylus and its buttons to make it easier to see how to configure it.
- The Drawing Tablet page in System Settings now makes it easier to recover from a bad tablet calibration: there's now an auto-revert timer that you have to explicitly dismiss, and a more prominent "reset" button if necessary.
- The Recent Files page in System Preferences now uses the standard grid item style.
- The Information Center now displays page loading errors in a more human-like manner.
- When we use the Task Manager setting to prevent attention-demanding apps from forcing an auto-hide panel to be visible, the settings dialog will not display a message asking if the app itself has an option to disable this behavior.
- Portal-based open/save dialogs are now modal to their parent windows, as are non-portal-based versions.
- Discover, Info Center, and DrKonqi now respect the monospace font set for views that use monospaced text, instead of simply using a fixed monospace font.
- Any password already entered in the password field on the login screen is now cleared when switching users.
- Opening a Plasma Vault now opens it in a new tab in Dolphin if it's not an activity-specific Vault in a multi-activity environment. In this case, a Dolphin window in another activity could become active, which would immediately close it.
Framework 6.14
- The common Kirigami.FormLayout component used across System Preferences and many applications now has a more pleasing visual style when there isn't enough horizontal space to display everything in its normal view: when switched to narrow view, the content column is now centered and its width limited. This looks much better when the view is very wide, which is especially common in System Preferences when using the system in a language other than English or Chinese.
- Scrollable views in all QML-based KDE software now also play nice animations for horizontal mouse wheel scrolling, not just vertical mouse wheel scrolling.
All this arrives in KDE
As for bugs, there is still one high-priority bug and 21 of the 15 minutes left.
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.