During the course of this week, KDE has released the beta of Plasma 6.1. That will be the next major update to its graphical environment, and it will come with new functions. It will land in June, and they will take advantage of the coming weeks to improve as much as possible for its stable launch. This is something that can be seen in the news release published today, where many of the fixes are labeled Plasma 6.1.
In addition to the new functions, they also continue to make up the interface. The changes that allow us to do something different seem to be the most important, but if the operating system looks ugly the feelings are not so positive. What comes next is the list with news that have taken place in the last seven days on KDE.
News coming to KDE
- Dolphin now includes a feature to move selected items to a new folder, all at once (Ahmet Hakan Çelik, Dolphin 24.08):
- The KDE desktop portal implementation now includes support for the Input Capture portal (David Redondo, Plasma 6.1).
- Plasma now supports turning on and off the feature on some Lenovo IdeaPad and Legion laptops whereby the battery can be set to only charge up to a specific fixed level (sometimes 60%, sometimes 80%; depends on the machine ) to maximize battery health (Fabian Arndt, Plasma 6.1).
- Plasma's editing mode has a nice new zoom effect to help us notice and understand that we're in a different mode, and also to make it easier to exit once we're done (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1).
- The screen locker can now be set to unlock without a password, allowing it to be used as a traditional screen saver by activating a visually appealing wallpaper plugin and disabling the clock (Kristen McWilliam, Plasma 6.1).
Improvements in the user's interface
- The long national nightmare of error buzz is over. Plasma now intercepts attempts to ring the system bell and replaces them with a nice sound from the active sound theme (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.1).
- KRunner search results already prioritized apps by default, but now they also prioritize System Preferences pages (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 6.1).
- On the Power Management page of System Preferences, some UI controls that used spin boxes have been replaced with elegant combo boxes (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.1).
- The Printers page of System Preferences now guides you through the process of installing the system-config-printer package to improve printer detection, if it was not pre-installed on our distribution (Mike Noe, Plasma 6.1).
- Getting information from weather providers can sometimes be a little wonky, so Plasma's weather report widget now advises to try again in a bit when this occurs (Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1):
- The way the Welcome Center presents KRunner has undergone a major overhaul, and now displays a stylish animated representation of its actual use. In addition, the final page is now more agile and requires less time and money (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.1):
- Improved the way SVG images render on screen when using a fractional scaling factor, reducing blurring (Marco Martin, Frameworks 6.3).
Correction of minor bugs
- Filelight no longer counts files stored in the OneDrive cloud as local files taking up space (Harald Sitter, Filelight 24.05.1).
- In KColorChooser, the “Pick Screen Color” button is no longer missing in Wayland – well, I missed it – (Thomas Weißschuh, KColorChooser 24.05.1).
- Fixed a case where turning off an external monitor connected to a laptop with the lid closed could cause KWin to crash (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1).
- In Wayland, Plasma no longer closes when a large number of windows are opened (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1).
- The “Activation Gestures” category of the System Preferences Accessibility page is back, after being accidentally removed when the page was ported to QML (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.1).
- In Wayland, when running apps that have icons in the system tray, there is no longer a small invisible square in the top left corner of the screen that eats up input, and there is also no high CPU usage with certain layouts. the screen (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1).
- Pressing Meta+B repeatedly no longer opens multiple Power Profile selector OSDs, and therefore no longer represents a way to exhaust system memory by generating an infinite stack of them (Fabian Arndt, Plasma 6.1).
- KWin is more reliable at detecting the physical size of screens (Jakub Piecuch, Plasma 6.1).
- When using a Plasma Panel in “Fit Content” mode with only an icon-only Task Manager, there is no longer unnecessary empty space to the right of it when logging in (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.1).
- In the dialog that allows you to choose windows and screens to share, clicking checkboxes to select items now works (Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.3).
- Fixed several issues that prevented certain Breeze icons from adjusting their colors correctly when running with a dark color scheme, as well as issues with generating static icons compatible with the dark scheme (Corbin Schwimmbeck, Frameworks 6.3).
- The KWidgetsAddons framework has been revised to include a fix for an issue that caused OBS to crash when selecting files, and also one that caused KMessageWidgets to sometimes display incorrect background colors (Joshua Goins and Albert Astals Cid, KWidgetsAddons frameworks 6.2.2 .).
- The KWallet framework has been redesigned to include a fix for an issue that caused the Secrets portal to not work in Flatpak applications (Nicolas Fella, KWallet 6.2.1.).
- Context menus should now appear as separate windows with title bars when activated in an inactive window (Vlad Zahorodnii, Qt 6.7.2).
In total, 105 bugs have been fixed this week.
When will this all come to KDE?
plasma 6.1 will arrive on June 18, and 6.2 will land later, still without a scheduled date. Frameworks 6.3 will arrive on June 7 and KDE Gear 24.05.1 will arrive on the 13th of the same month. KDE Gear 24.08 will arrive in August and the usual release schedule will return
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.