This week's KDE update is a big one! Yes, Plasma 6.2 is in its final stages of development with a soft feature freeze in place. This means the devs have incorporated the final features for this release cycle, and they're turning their attention to bug-fixing for the next six weeks before the grand unveiling in October.
So, what can you expect from Plasma 6.2? Let's just say it's going to be awesome, brimming with exciting new features and refinements.
Table of Contents
Battling Bugs, Squashing Issues
Beyond the shiny new features, a key focus for the KDE team recently has been on quality assurance (QA), specifically tackling those pesky bugs. And I can clearly see that they have made progress!
The total number of open bug reports for Plasmashell has plummeted to a multi-year low of 1022, with unconfirmed reports hitting a low unseen since 2015, now at a mere 301. The goal? To drive that number of unconfirmed bug reports below 200 by the end of September!
Your bug reports are invaluable to this effort! They don't disappear into the void; the KDE team prioritises reviewing and addressing them. So, if you encounter any issues with Plasma, don't hesitate to report them on the KDE bug tracker.
Fresh Features of Plasma 6.2
Plasma 6.2 is bringing a bunch of cool new features and improvements, making your KDE experience smoother and more enjoyable:
1. Inhibit Sleep and Screen Lock:
You can now prevent specific apps from stopping your computer from going to sleep or your screen from locking – a much-requested feature!
2. New Widget Spotlight:
Freshly installed widgets will be prominently displayed at the top of the widget grid with a "New!" badge for an hour, making them easy to spot.
3. Custom Avatar Cropping:
Personalise your user avatar on the System Settings' Users page with a custom image, and now you can crop it to your liking!
3. Extended Weather Forecasts:
The Plasma Weather widget gets an upgrade with support for 7-day forecasts and "chance of precipitation" data from BBC UK Met weather stations.
4. Better App Reviews in Discover:
Discover now provides helpful tips to guide you in writing more informative and useful reviews for non-proprietary apps.
5. Yearly Donation Nudge:
A new yearly notification gently reminds you about the option to donate to KDE, but don't worry, you can permanently disable it if you wish.
UI Upgrades for a Refined Experience
Aesthetics and user-friendliness haven't been forgotten either. Plasma 6.2 includes several user interface improvements:
1. Improved Overview Effect:
The KWin Overview effect now provides a clearer representation of multi-monitor setups and virtual desktops.
2. System Tray Layout Overhaul:
Enjoy a more space-efficient and text-friendly grid layout for the expanded System Tray, especially noticeable for languages with longer words.
3. Accessibility Settings Relocation:
The settings for KWin's colour blindness correction feature have been moved to a more logical and accessible location – the System Settings' Accessibility page!
4. "Minimize All" Refinement:
The "Minimize All" widget has been refined to only manage windows on the current virtual desktop and activity, preventing unexpected behaviour.
Other notable UI improvements:
- When using Global Edit mode, closing a panel’s configuration window while in the panel’s own edit mode will now return the user to the global edit mode instead of exiting Global Edit mode completely.
- The error message displayed when manually installing a Plasma widget fails is now more helpful. The new message provides a description of the error, which should make it easier for users to troubleshoot issues.
- The text and labels in several areas of Plasma and System Settings have been updated to align with the Human Interface Guidelines’ best practices.
- Dialog windows throughout KDE software have new icons.
Bug Fixes
- A bug that could corrupt files on SFTP servers when edited and saved through Dolphin has been addressed.
- Changing the system's Global Theme now correctly updates the colours of recolorable GTK applications.
- Multi-finger touch gestures on touchscreens no longer disrupt Plasma's state.
- A regression in Plasma's desktop that caused dragged items to revert to their original locations has been fixed.
- Job progress notifications displayed by Plasma have been adjusted to prevent button text from being cut off in languages with long words and phrases.
- Two issues in Plasma's Emoji Selector that caused the selection highlight to disappear and always copied the first search result have been resolved.
- The tooltips for items in the expanded Plasma System Tray are now less glitchy.
- The Maliit virtual keyboard's position is no longer affected by vertical panels.
- The Plasma Folder View widget's popup can now be resized to a smaller size when placed on a panel.
- Closing the System Settings window while a "Get New [thing]" window is open no longer causes major issues.
Performance Boosts and Technical Tweaks
Under the hood, Plasma 6.2 is getting a performance boost and some noteworthy technical enhancements:
1. Discover Gets a Speed Injection:
Experience a significantly snappier Discover with faster launch times, speedier UI loading, quicker icon loading, and smoother scrolling through extensive lists.
2. Streamlined Flatpak Updates:
Updating multiple Flatpak apps in environments with hardened security is now smoother with a more sensible authentication process in Discover.
3. Standardised Font Installation:
Newly installed fonts will now reside in a standardised location (i.e. ~/.local/share/fonts/), making them accessible to sandboxed apps without any hiccups.
This is just a glimpse of the improvements coming to KDE. For a complete picture of this week's updates, be sure to visit the Nate Graham's official blog post given at the end.
You can also contribute to the KDE project by testing the latest Plasma builds, reporting bugs, or even diving into development. Every contribution, big or small, is valuable to the KDE community.
Resource:
Last Week's KDE Update:
