This week in KDE: Plasma 6 Alpha approaches

Time has a way of creeping up, and the Plasma 6 alpha release is on November 8th. People are scrambling to get their features in before either the soft feature freeze (on Monday) or the hard one (a few weeks later). So this has been a week of big changes! Starting on Monday, we’ll officially start the process of convergence and shift focus to bug fixing and UI polishing, with the currently in-flight new features trickling in too.

KDE 6 MegaRelease

(Includes all software to be released on the February 28th mega-release: Plasma 6, Frameworks 6, and apps from Gear 24.02)

General info – Open issues: 113

Discover now has a better way to present app ratings: now it shows a big overview of the ratings with quotations from the best ones, and you can still read all of them in a popup like before. When you do, they’re now sorted by “relevance” which is a determined by combination of recency, helpfulness votes, and the version being reviewed matching the version available to you (Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2):

Discover’s search has been hugely improved, and now generally always returns the results you’re expecting when you search for something that exists and is available (Marco Martin, link):

System Settings’ Energy Saving page has been rewritten in QML, which fixed all of the open bug reports for the old one, and also has a nicer and easier-to-parse visual design (Jakob Petsovits, link):

When using a Plasma style without the grouped task indicator SVG (of which Breeze is now one), the Task Manager now switches to a fancy new style to show grouped tasks (me: Nate Graham. Link):

Vertically-space-limited line graphs in System Monitor and the Plasma widgets of the same name no longer let their legends get cut off (Arjen Hiemstra, link):

Pen input using a graphics tablet can now be manually re-mapped to the entire desktop area consisting of all screens, not just a single screen (Aki Sakurai, link)

Transient dialog windows (i.e. windows that close with the Escape key that you typically open from another window, like settings dialogs) are now handled in the Plasma Wayland session like they are on X11: they no longer appear in the Task Manager as separate windows, propagate “needs attention” status to their parents, and so on (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Ark can now extract files from multi-volume ZIP files (Ilya Pominov, Ark 24.02. Link)

When using “Repeat this track” mode in Elisa, manually skipping forward or back to the next or previous tracks now works as expected (Quinten Kock, link)

KRunner’s web shortcuts runner now has two new entries: Codeberg (search for “cb [search term]”) and PyPi (search for “pypi [search term]”) (Salvo Tomaselli, link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)

Fixed one of the most common random crashes in Plasma or when changing audio device settings in System Settings (David Redondo, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Fixed an extremely subtle threading bug that could cause Plasma or KWin to randomly crash when files being watched for changes got certain types of changes with certain timings, which in Qt 6 became easier to trigger by switching Kate or Konsole profiles while KRunner’s Kate Sessions or Konsole Profiles runners were active (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0 and Plasma 5.27.10 with Frameworks 5.112. Link)

It’s no longer possible for the screen locker to break when you either had an extremely large number of session-restored apps, or any of your session-restored apps did something naughty and silently exhausted the system’s session restoration resources. Instead, when either of these things happens, Plasma will warn you about it and prevent the resource exhaustion (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0. Link)

When using NetworkManager 1.44, restarting the NetworkManager system service–which sometimes happens automatically when the computer goes to sleep and then wakes up again– no longer causes the Networks widget in the System Tray to either disappear or stop displaying any networks (Ilya Katsnelson, Frameworks 5.112. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 2 last week). Current list of bugs
• 52 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 55 last week). Current list of bugs
• 98 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.

How You Can Help

We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! We’re almost to the 50% mark of our goal of 500 members, so if you like the work we’re doing, joining up and spreading the wealth is a great way to share the love. 🙂

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bug-fixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by February.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!