The KDE 6 mega-release is due in a little under three weeks! And folks have remained in diligent bugfixing-and-polishing mode, because we want this release to be as smooth and drama-free as possible! If you haven’t already tried it out, this is a good time to. Find all the bugs that are bugging you so we can hopefully fix them before the final release!
KDE 6 Mega-Release
(Includes all software to be released on the February 28th mega-release: Plasma 6, Frameworks 6, and apps from Gear 24.02)
UI improvements
KWin’s “Active screen follows mouse” setting is now gone; now the active screen is always the one with the cursor on it, or the last one that was tapped with a touchscreen. This turns out to be much simpler and it’s what we think most people wanted anyway, hopefully alleviating complaints about OSDs and new windows opening on unexpected screens (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
You can now set the data range manually for “horizontal bars” charts in System Monitor and its widgets (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
When you use the System Tray’s “Always show all entries” option, now it actually does always show all entries, instead of sneakily keeping some of them hidden anyway according to some internal logic which was not obvious (Jin Liu, link)
Searching through clipboard entries is now case-insensitive (Yifan Zhu, link)
Bug fixes
Important note: I don’t mention fixes for bugs that were never released to users; it’s just too much for me (it would probably be too much for you to read as well), and most people never encountered them in the first place. Because we’re in the middle of a big Plasma dev cycle, there are a lot of these bugs! So big thanks to everyone who’s made it a priority to fix them!
Fixed an issue affecting the Plasma X11 session that could cause the screen to end up black with only a movable cursor when you wake your system from sleep while using an NVIDIA GPU with its proprietary drivers (David Redondo, link)
CPU temperature sensors now work for a variety of Intel and AMD motherboards where they didn’t previously work (Arjen Hiemstra, link 1 and link 2)
When System Monitor’s window opens in maximized state, de-maximizing it now returns it to its pre-maximized geometry as expected (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
In various Kirigami-based apps, double-clicking on a page to open it multiple times is no longer interpreted that way–because opening the same page multiple times makes no sense–which avoids accidentally breaking the app (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
KScreen is now smarter about choosing better-matching screen settings when told to make one screen mirror another (Yifan Zhu, link)
Buttons and scrollbars in the Sticky Notes widget are now always distinguishable no matter what color you choose for the background of the note and no matter what your system color scheme is (me: Nate Graham, link)
A couple of Plasma UI elements with text on them that weren’t previously translatable now are (Emil Sari, link)
When your Task Manager is set up to only show tasks from the current screen, now this still keeps working when you switch around your screen arrangement without restarting Plasma (Someone awesome, link)
Header text in System Tray applets now elides instead of overflowing with a small window size and very long applet text (me: Nate Graham, link)
Other bug information of note:
- 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
- 32 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 145 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over last week. Full list of bugs
Post-Mega-Release
When you hit the Alt+Tab shortcut with no windows open, you’ll now see a nice “No open windows” message instead of a broken-looking task switcher or even nothing (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1. Link)
The ancient feature to add a spacer in your window titlebars returns! (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1, link)
Automation & Systematization
Added an autotest to make sure that loading Digital Clock plugins still works (Fushan Wen, link)
…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
Thanks to you, our Plasma 6 fundraiser has been a crazy success! I originally thought the goal of 500 new KDE e.V. supporting members was over-optimistic, but you’ve all proven me happily wrong. We’re now up to an amazing 800 members, blown past our stretch goals, and 1000 members by launch time seems like it might even be feasible. Thank you everyone for the confidence you’ve shown in us; we’ll try not to screw it up! 🙂 For those who haven’t donated to become members yet, spreading the wealth via this fundraiser is a great way to share the love. 🙂
If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Which issues? These issues. Plasma 6 is very close to a release and in a good state, but could still benefit from some final bug-fixing and polishing. And as I mentioned before, if you haven’t tried it out yet, please do!
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!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
One nasty Nvidia bug down!! Still many to go though 😦
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It is worrying that we are still dealing with these black screen critical bugs with wayland at this point.
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well it is nvidia’s fault. Not something Wayland or KDE should be blamed for.
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That was an X11 bug.
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Is it too late to get my name in Plasma 6? I just found out about the fundraiser and signed up for the €100/year supporter tier. I’m more than happy to support free software.
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Not too late! Names are still added until the fundraiser ends on the 28th.
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Will the NVIDIA black screen fix get backported to 5.27? I ran into that across multiple releases on Tumbleweed and Kinioite (UBlue).
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I am the one who submitted the bug report for spacer in window titlebars. Thank you KDE for listening to users !
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[quote]KWin now always treats the active screen as the one with the active window on it, rather than having the “active screen follows mouse” setting.[/quote]
Wait… “active screen follows mouse” existed in KDE?
When I switched back to late-stage KDE 4 / early KDE 5 after jumping from KDE 3.5 to LXDE, I found it SO frustrating that there was no option I could find to replicate my “click the launcher then fling the cursor to the monitor I wanted the application to appear on” trick. (I have a “gaming mouse” and run it at a fairly high pointer speed.)
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Oops. Too much time spent on BBcode-using platforms recently. I sometimes also make that mistake with Markdown. WordPress.com really needs a 5-minute edit window.
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…and yes, I’m still half-asleep, having just woken up and that was originally going to be a post on Phoronix before it registered that you have comments here, thus the phrasing of the quote. However did you know? 😛
(I’ll shut up now)
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I’ve made my first steps into Linux with KDE in the late 90s and have used it on and off since then. For the last 10 years I have chosen LXDE/LXQt for its speed and simplicity.
I use Debian stable for my daily life and after the last upgrade LXDE did not meet my expectations (resume from sleep unreliable, screen handle was a pain with my notebook). Then I tried Plasma and have used it ever since. After watching the interviews with you and David E. I even gave Wayland a try and didn’t experience any showstoppers! Thus I am writing this from Plasma 5.27.5 Wayland and am happy with it.
I became a supporting member of KDE months ago and am looking very much forward to the Megarelease in a few weeks! (Despite the fact that on Debian stable it is still many months away from me.)
Keep your TwiK posts coming, they bring us non coding fanboys up to date. Thanks!
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How about adding pixel perfect scrolling to Kate?
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What about touchpad gestures on Wayland in Plasma 6? Will the gesture-overview will show up the old overview effect as it is now, or was it transferred to the new overview effect? This shouldn’t be anything complicated aside just changing some small config which effect is activated with the 4-finger swipe gesture.
I’m not asking about UI control of Wayland touchpad gestures, because I know they are still not there (sadly).
However, I noticed, that the new overview effect has awful performance. When first invoked, it lags till it shows up without animation (in 90% of cases). Next overviews are working fine and are fluent, but it’s enough to wait 1-3 minutes and try it again and there is another 1-2s lag till the overview appears, again usually without animation (the overview just jumps suddenly, because lag made it skip it). The old overview doesn’t have this issue, or it is diminished strongly. I didn’t report this new overview effect, because at this point it’s better to see how it works on Plasma 6 and report it then, if it is still present. Earlier, I had a weaker laptop, so I assume this is happening because lack of CPU or RAM or whatever, but now, I have modern, very powerful hardware and this problem is even more visible. 32GB RAM and 16 CPU Cores over 4 GHz should be enough to have fluent kwin animations and no lags (AMD/AMD hardware).
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The new one has gestures. Four finger swipe up or down enters it and will cycle through modes/views.
Performance is a concern of mine too, and we’ve been incrementally working on it. Note that the lag on first launch was present in Plasma 5 too; that’s not a new thing for the 6 version. We have bug reports on it.
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Just fresh-installed Nobara 39 and updated everything… and yeah, Plasma 6 is just lagging really bad on the overview effect… in my case it goes like at 20 fps… actually, just like Gnome’s. I’ve been using Plasma just because it always ran smoothly on the animation side (not like Gnome), but now… it’s over?
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Yeah, I am on Plasma 6 and the lag is there, exactly as earlier. Curiously, when play with the effect, all seems to be fine, but when I work, it lags all the time. Then I realized, the difference is that I have way more windows during work plus I have XWayland windows (usually from Electron). When I close most windows and leave 4, all Wayland ones, then it works smooth as a butter.
Note, that I have a new laptop with 32GB RAM and Ryzen 7 7840HS, so it is very capable of handling way more then just overview.
Of course, after first lag, the next overview is smooth but within a minute or more, it lags again, so as if some resource was dropped and needed to be loaded again, while this resource is a bottlenecked somewhere. I see no CPU spikes, but it may be iGPU thing. Will this be visible on core usage in system monitor?
I’ll do more tests to see where is the border between fluent and lag state, but it seems to me that the number is 4 windows (no matter which ones). With 5 windows (all Wayland) the lag is very small, but still perceivable, animation lags then jumps instead of being fluently showed from the begining.
Anyway, no matter how better is the new overview and how greatly it feels to use multiple virtual screens, lags make it unpleasant to use.
How do you measure or see screen FPSes?
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