This week Nate Graham, of KDE, has published its weekly article starting by reporting on something that not many users may know. There is an automatic bug reporting tool in Plasma 6, and it is helping a lot. It is a function known as Opt-in, which means that we are the users if we decide to activate it or not and it is disabled by default. Many have it enabled, and KDE is using the data to better understand what happens with unexpected shutdowns and other crashes.
These reports make a big difference, they do not disappear into a black hole. Thanks to this feature, the desktop will improve even more, and it is hoped that the bad memories of KDE 4 will be left behind, but really. It is possible that the large number of bugs that they published in Plasma 6.0.3 are related to all this , but let's go with the news this week.
Just one new feature this time, that the power and battery widget now responds to middle clicks (or three fingers on the touchpad) and swipes: a middle click will lock or activate sleep and lock screen, and swiping will change the active profile . It will arrive in Plasma 6.1.
UI improvements coming to KDE
- The power and battery widget now displays an appropriate icon when manually locking sleep and screen lock (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1):
- Some of the menu items and toolbar buttons in the desktop context menu and Edit Mode global toolbar are now more concise (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1):
- The opening and closing animations of expandable list items in Plasma's systray widgets now respect the global animation speed, and are also slightly faster and more responsive overall (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1).
- “Get new [thing]” dialogs in all KDE software are now sorted by highest number of downloads first (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 6.1).
Correction of minor bugs
From the following list, several bugs have been removed and fixed in the plasma 6.0.3 that arrived during this week.
- Fixed an issue that could cause Discover to crash on startup under certain circumstances (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.4).
- In the Plasma
- Fixed a case where Plasma could crash after changing the panel position in certain settings (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.1).
- Fixed a case where the Baloo file indexer could crash after creating or renaming files or folders (Méven Car, Frameworks 6.1).
This week a total of 209 bugs have been fixed.
Performance and technical
- Discover is now much faster at displaying app reviews, especially when it does so immediately after the app is launched (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.3).
- Discover is now also faster at displaying information about large offline updates (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.4).
- The Baloo file indexer no longer attempts to index content on temporarily mounted file systems, such as network shares and overlayfs mounts (Adam Fontenot, Frameworks 6.1).
- The list of recently accessed files that is saved to disk by open/save dialogs and other KFileWidget consumers is now written to the configuration file for volatile state data, not for user-directed configuration data. user (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.1).
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 6.0.4 will arrive on April 15, and Plasma 6.1 will arrive in June, on the 18th. Frameworks 6.1 will arrive on April 5 and KDE Gear 24.02.2 is scheduled for the 11th of the same month. In August we should return to the usual numbering/scheduling of a new major update in April-August-December.
To enjoy all this as soon as possible we have to add the repository backports of KDE, use an operating system with special repositories like Kde neon or any distribution whose development model is Rolling Release.
Images and content: pointieststick.com.