Merry Christmas (or should I say Khristmas?) for those of you celebrating it today! And we have quite a few very nice presents for all of KDE’s good boys and girls:
New Features
Samba printer browsing! (Harald Sitter, print-manager 22.04):
Before you ask, yes, this UI is pretty dated. It will eventually be re-done as a part of the ongoing port of all System Settings pages to QtQuick.
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
Yakuake’s window is now faster to appear (Jan Blackquill, Yakuake 21.12.1)
In the Plasma Wayland session, Yakuake no longer appears underneath a top panel (Tranter Madi, Yakuake 22.04)
Partition Manager no longer keeps asking for authentication over and over again if you cancel the authentication prompt, and instead shows you a friendly message indicating what the problem is and how you can fix it (Alessio Bonfiglio, Partition Manager 22.04):
Fixed a memory leak in Notifications (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.9)
The Digital Clock’s calendar view now always shows the right colors when using the Breeze Light Plasma theme, or any other theme that has hardcoded light colors (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.23.5)
Plasma now shuts down faster by no longer accepting new connections after it’s begun the shutdown process, which particularly helps when using KDE Connect (Tomasz Lemeich, Plasma 5.24)
System Settings pages that require authentication when clicking the “Apply” button no longer display half-cut-off text under their name when using the default Sidebar mode (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24)
The new “Set as Wallpaper” context menu item now only changes the wallpapers of the desktops in the current Activity, not all Activities (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24)
The link modification UI of the Properties dialog now shows the correct information in the correct places (Aleksei Nikiforov, 5.90)
User Interface Improvements
The “Cover Switch” and “Flip Switch” effects are now back, newly written in QML for easier extensibility in the future! (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.24)
The Desktop Cube effect will be next, and hopefully should show up in Plasma 5.25!
The Desktop context menu’s “Open in Dolphin” item has been replaced with “Configure Display Settings” by default (Ezike Ebuka and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24):
And don’t forget that this menu is configurable (in Configure Desktop and Wallpaper > Mouse Actions > Right-Button > “Configure”), so you can remove stuff from it yourself that you never use!
You can now drag a panel from anywhere on its Edit Mode toolbar, not just from a tiny button. And this is now more obvious with the addition of a label that indicates it (Björn Feber, Plasma 5.24):
The screen layout OSD now indicates screens’ scale factors in it (Méven Carl, Plasma 5.24)
When sending or receiving a file via Bluetooth, a system notification is now always shown, rather than only being shown if the transfer takes more than 500ms (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.24)
The Bluetooth applet now calls a phone a phone (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.24):
Separator lines in Breeze-themed menus once again have a bit of vertical padding to them (Luke Horwell, Plasma 5.24)
System Settings pages that display a single big grid or list now have a more modern frameless style (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.90)
Toolbar buttons that you can click-and-hold to show a menu will now also show that menu when you right-click them (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.90)
…And everything else
Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.
How You Can Help
Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover 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!
Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation
