It took a little longer than usual, but article this week’s on what’s to come for the KDE world was released this weekend. The title of the post alone tells you a lot: “Plasma in progress”. So this means that Plasma 5.23 beta is now available, and in the list of new features that have advanced today there are many changes that will come in the next major release, namely in Plasma 5.24. One of them concerns the accent color that can be chosen. So, the KDE project starts to focus on the new features of Plasma 5.24 which already has many new features as you can see below.
KDE starts to focus on what’s new in Plasma 5.24
- You can now choose your own custom highlighting or highlight color on the Colors page of System Preferences (Plasma 5.24).
- In Plasma Wayland, KWin now supports ‘DRM lease’, which allows VR headphones to be back-backed and perform optimally (Plasma 5.24).
- KWin now allows you to optionally set a global keyboard shortcut to move a window to the center of the screen (Plasma 5.24).
- The Open dialog now offers a context menu for opening the selected file in a different external application, in case we want or need to preview it before opening it in the application that requested the file, and the small preview offered in the file itself. file dialog box is not big enough (Frameworks 5.87).
Google will move to develop innovations for Android in the main Linux kernel
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- When we print a document in Okular and choose a scaling mode that requires the “Force Raster” setting to be enabled to work, this setting is now automatically enabled so we don’t have to know and remember to do this manually (Okular 21.08.2) .
- Kate no longer waits to exit while the Replicode plugin is active (Kate 21.08.2).
- Dolphin no longer remains secretly open in the background after compressing/archiving files using the context menu and then exiting the application (Ark 21.08.2).
- Konsole’s tab bar now responds instantly to changes in the system-wide color scheme or font size, instead of having to restart (Konsole 21.12).
- The background of Elisa’s “Running” page no longer blinks when the window is resized (Elisa 21.12).
- No Plasma Wayland:
- Installing Snap applications into the session no longer causes KWin to crash (Plasma 5.23).
- Fixed a bug in KWin that could crash the entire session (Plasma 5.23).
- The cursor is no longer invisible after the screen is turned off and on again (Plasma 5.23).
- Text copied from one GTK app can now be pasted into other apps after closing the GTK app (Plasma 5.23).
- Copying text from applications should insert broken empty items into the clipboard, let alone (Plasma 5.23).
- Screen borders now work correctly in multi-screen configurations with auto-hiding panels (Plasma 5.23).
- Numbers can now be typed into the spin box used to choose the thickness of a panel (Plasma 5.23).
- The audio balance function on the Audio Volume page of System Preferences now works again (Plasma 5.23).
- The Kickoff app launcher user image/avatar element now shows our initials when we haven’t defined a custom image (Plasma 5.23).
- The text on the System Preferences Activities page is now translatable and should be translated soon (Plasma 5.23).
- The KWin Scripts page of System Preferences no longer has a help button that does nothing (Plasma 5.23).
- The slide handle for a volume control in the System Tray’s Audio Volume applet no longer displays visual glitches while your stream is playing audio (Plasma 5.23).
- The setting “Automatically only mount removable media that was manually mounted before” on the Removable Devices page of System Preferences now works (Plasma 5.24).
- The startup sound (if hemoms enabled) now plays as expected when using Plasma’s “Systemd startup” function (Plasma 5.24).
- Discover is now faster to check for updates (Frameworks 5.87).
- Files copied using a KDE application now fully respect the system umask setting and are therefore created in the destination folder with the correct permissions (Frameworks 5.87).
- The header bars at the top of many Plasma applets now respect their color scheme for the entire width of the line at the bottom (Frameworks 5.87).
User interface improvements
- Skanlite now remembers the last scanner used (Skanlite 21.12).
- Konsole now has only one option to control the visibility of the menubar and it always works, instead of two options in different places that conflict with each other (Konsole 21.12).
- Double-clicking the splitter between two adjacent split views in Konsole now resizes the views so that each has the same amount of space as in Dolphin (Konsole 21.12).
- Okular now displays a sensible message when it asks us to enter the name of the author of an annotation (Okular 12.12).
- The “Positive”, “Neutral” and “Negative” text colors in KDE applications are now easier to read when they appear in a selected list item (Plasma 5.23).
- Discover now makes it more obvious how to file a bug report in our distro when you run into an issue caused by the distro’s faulty packaging, because there is now a big “Report this issue” button that takes you directly to the bug tracker ( Plasma 5.24).
- The ‘Breeze High Contrast’ coloring was removed as it actually offered a lower contrast than the closest colorway, Breeze Dark. Existing users will be migrated to Breeze Dark (Plasma 5.24).
- The Breeze color scheme has been renamed “Breeze Classic” to better distinguish it from the Breeze Light and Breeze Dark color schemes (Plasma 5.24).
- The usernames below the avatar images on the login, lockout and logout screens have been increased slightly to provide a better scale with the size of the avatar images (Plasma 5.24).
- The header text in Kirigami app toolbars is now smaller and fits a little better to scale everything around it (Frameworks 5.87).
- In clipboard applet and “Share” menu, when a QR code can be generated from some text, it is now called QR code, not barcode (Plasma 5.24 and Frameworks 5.87)
Arrival dates for all this in KDE
Plasma 5.23 will arrive on October 12th. KDE Gear 21.08.2 will be released on October 7th, and although there is no specific date for KDE Gear 21.12 yet, we know we will be able to use it in December. KDE Frameworks 5.87 will be released on October 9th. The plasma 5.24 whose first innovations were cited today, has no scheduled date.
To take advantage of all this as quickly as possible, we have to add the KDE Backports repository or use an operating system with special repositories like KDE neon or any distribution whose development model is Rolling Release, although the latter usually takes a little longer than the system. By KDE
