This week, Nate Graham from KDE, has begun His article of news saying: «This week we've made great progress on a lot of UI issues and bugs, I bet you found at least one issue that was bothering you and got it fixed in between«. The slogan is clear: with Plasma 5.25 and 5.26 full of new features, and at least during this week, they have begun to dedicate themselves to polishing everything they have added.
In addition to all the general bugs, KDE also launched a new point or initiative weeks ago, that of the 15 minute mistakes. They started with over 80, and there are 51 left to solve (this week they solved two and found one). These errors are bugs that are seen quickly (hence the 15-minute thing), and, depending on the project, they are the ones that give the desktop a bad name, so they have created a separate section, forgive the redundancy, and have put a Diana.
As for new features, this week we only got one preview: non-EXIF textual metadata stored inside PNG images is now extracted and displayed in the properties dialog (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.97).
15 minute bugs
- Discover no longer sometimes fails to find reviews for apps, especially right after launch (Aleix Pol González, Plasma 5.24.6).
- The Overview effect hotkey should no longer randomly break (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26).
UI enhancements that will add to KDE
- Discover no longer misleadingly displays error notifications about offline updates that were successful but for some reason caused the underlying PackageKit backend to produce a strange “[thing] is already installed” message (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.6).
- The "Add Rule" sheet on the Firewall page of System Preferences is now fully readable and better looking (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25.4).
- The highlight effect of closing windows in the new Present Windows and Desktop Grid effects is now larger, making it easier to see (Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26).
- Discover now displays a “Loading…” placeholder while app reviews are loading (Aleix Pol González and Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26).
- In the panel edit mode toolbar, those little draggable handles now show tooltips when hovered over so you can tell what they do, and can also be double-clicked to restore their original states (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26).
- In the screen launcher dialog for sandbox apps that want to record the screen (such as OBS when running from Snap or Flatpak), list items in the view now behave more rationally if doubled click on them (Aleix Pol González, Plasma 5.26).
- When a sandbox app is recording the screen and the system tray displays an icon to force stop recording, clicking it now displays a context menu with "Stop recording" instead of stopping the recording immediately before that we've had a chance to find out what it does (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.26).
- In the Comic Strip widget, the context menu item that previously said "Run Associated Application" now says "Open in [default web browser]" (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.26).
- Visual transitions in the Pager widget (for example, when a window is moved, maximized, or tiled) are now animated (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26).
- In the properties dialog, when a file has GPS coordinates in the metadata, this information is now displayed as a clickable link (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.97).
- The "Help Center" app icon is now always colored when using the Breeze icon theme, just like other app icons (Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.97).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- Comic Strip widget context menu items that don't work when offline or before the current strip has loaded now disable themselves instead of allowing them to be clicked and Plasma crashes (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.24.7).
- In the X11 Plasma session, the Color Picker widget is again able to pick screen colors (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.24.7).
- Utility submission for reviews in Discover works again (Aleix Pol González, Plasma 5.24.7).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, fixed a way where KWin could crash when pressing physical buttons on a connected drawing tablet (Aleix Pol González, Plasma 5.25.4).
- You can now navigate between windows and desktops using the keyboard in the Desktop Grid effect (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.4).
- In the Plasma X11 session, the “Window shade” function works again (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.4).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, the cursor launch feedback animation that plays when launching an XWayland app now stops playing once the app has been launched (Aleix Pol González, Plasma 5.25.4).
- Fixed the final way menu titles could be cut off when a long menu title was paired with short menu items (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.25.4).
- In the Colors page of System Preferences, color scheme previews are now 100% accurate and truly reflect your colors (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25.4).
- In the Plasma Wayland session, the submenus in the Kicker app menu can now be fully keyboard navigated (Awesome Someone, Plasma 5.26).
- Plasma is now faster to load (Xuetian Weng, Plasma 5.26).
- When saving files in a sandbox app to a folder that already has a lot of stuff in it, you will no longer randomly see sometimes meaningless notifications saying "Browsing: Failed" (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.26).
- In-window menu bars in QtQuick applications now display the correct background color when using a color scheme with header colors, such as Breeze Light and Breeze Dark (Kartikey Subramanium, Frameworks 5.97).
- Spectacle and other apps now correctly detect the installation status of OBS Studio, Vokoscreen and other third-party apps in their "install other apps" menu (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.97).
When will this all come to KDE?
Plasma 5.25.4 will arrive on Tuesday, August 4, Frameworks 5.97 will be available on August 13 and KDE Gear 22.08 on August 18. Plasma 5.26 will be available from October 11.
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.