149
Every week, KDE developer Nate Graham shares his insights and updates on what's happening in the KDE ecosystem through his weekend update blog post. This week's KDE update highlights significant enhancements to the Linux desktop environment, with a particular focus on the Discover app and Plasma 6.2.
Discover, KDE's software center application, receives multiple UI improvements, performance enhancements, and bug fixes, indicating its growing maturity and stability. Alongside Discover, Plasma 6.2 benefits from various notable UI improvements and bug fixes, solidifying its position as a robust and user-friendly desktop environment.
This blog post provides a quick overview of the changes and enhancements in KDE, based on the Nate Graham's update posted in the Adventures in Linux and KDE blog.
Table of Contents
KDE Plasma 6.2 Update: Discover UI, Bug Fixes, and Performance Enhancements
New Features
- Users can now map drawing tablet pen buttons to mouse clicks, expanding on the existing functionality of mapping them to keyboard shortcuts. The user interface for this feature has also been improved.
- A new sound, enabled by default, now plays when a screen is connected or disconnected, similar to the existing notification for USB devices.
UI Improvements
- The Discover app page has been redesigned to better adhere to the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), resulting in better margins, more compact content rating displays, underlined links instead of buttons for web URLs, whitespace replacing separator lines, and the relocation of distro-packaged app permission displays.
- The menu for clipboard items, accessed with Meta+V, now shares its UI with the Plasma Clipboard widget. This change provides maintenance benefits, a more consistent UI, and enhanced visuals for extensive text and images.
- Welcome Center pages for Overview and Plasma Vaults have received visual upgrades with new graphics. These graphics dynamically adapt to the system's active theme settings.
- Discover's notifier system tray icon frequency now aligns with the system's notification frequency settings, which can be configured in System Settings.
- Breeze-themed windows, when tiled to the screen's left or right edge, no longer have resizable pixels in the top-most area, improving usability by adhering to Fitts' Law.
- The Activities widget now scales correctly, preventing it from becoming excessively large on panels with substantial thickness.
- System Settings' Night Light page has improved functionality, preventing the setting of manual timings where the start and stop transitions would overlap and visually representing this restriction.
- The Autostart page in System Settings has a redesigned menu button that conforms to HIG.
- For visual consistency and adherence to HIG recommendations, the 'list-remove' Breeze icon has been updated to a red X, matching the 'edit-delete-remove' icon.
Bug Fixes
- A common cause of Powerdevil crashes, occurring after the system wakes from sleep due to inactivity, has been addressed.
- Sleep inhibition requests from Flatpak/sandboxed/portal-using apps are now functional.
- An issue where Plasma panel widgets became prematurely interactive when moving the panel to a different screen edge, before leaving Edit Mode, has been fixed.
- Two problems with Plasma's "Centered" and "Scaled and cropped" wallpaper positioning, which led to incorrect image displays at certain sizes and screen scales, have been resolved.
- Three regressions affecting Folder View in Plasma 6 have been fixed: the widget representation retaining its custom title, the persistence of old labels during renaming, and the inability to select other items via keyboard post-renaming.
- Discover no longer truncates the first letter of non-SPDX-compatible licenses on app pages.
- Fixed: Tab keystrokes leaking into XWayland apps during Alt+Tab window switching when using the default XWayland app keyboard snooping settings.
- Eliminated pixel gaps that appeared on the sides of maximized XWayland apps when using certain fractional scale factors.
- A Qt bug causing frequent Plasma crashes during common multi-screen activities has been addressed.
Performance and Technical Updates
- Discover's icon loading is now non-blocking, resulting in faster app launch times and smoother scrolling.
- The Sticky Keys features, "Ring system bell when modifier keys are used" and "Ring system bell when locking keys are toggled", are now implemented on Wayland, completing Sticky Keys support.
- KWin will no longer select an incorrect default scale factor for displays that inaccurately report their physical dimensions as extremely small (between 0 and 3 millimetres).
- Wayland: Improved activation behaviour for apps that intentionally suppress cursor launch feedback.
Automation and Systematization
- A new "All bugs reported by me" link on the https://bugs.kde.org homepage allows users to view all their bug reports, including closed ones.
- The bug janitor's warning messages, which alert users about the impending auto-closure of bugs, have been made more concise.
- The new bug template has been updated to provide clearer instructions on filling in version numbers, including recommending the use of the
kinfocommand-line tool.
Resource:
Related Read:
