This week in KDE: Distro upgrades for Fedora KDE in Discover

New Features

With the new XwaylandVideoBridge utility, you can now screencast native Wayland windows from Xwayland apps like Discord (Aleix Pol Gonzalez and David Edmundson, Link)

Dolphin now has an option to not change the information and preview shown in the Information Panel when hovering over files, and to instead only do so when deliberately selecting files (Oliver Beard, Dolphin 23.08. Link):

Discover can now upgrade from one major version of Fedora KDE to another! (Alessandro Astone, Plasma 6.0. Link)

User Interface Improvements

When using multiple monitors that all have the same name and serial number, they are now visually distinguished from one another in various places by showing their connector names (David Redondo, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)

Using Kicker’s “Sort applications alphabetically” setting now removes any manually-placed separator lines between applications, rather than positioning them nonsensically (Joshua Goins, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)

The text ” – Portal” is no longer confusingly appended to the window titles of open/save dialogs and authentication dialogs in portal-using apps (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0. Link 1 and link 2)

The Breeze icon theme now includes beautiful new icons for the Night Color feature (Philip Murray, Frameworks 5.105. Link):

Significant Bugfixes

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

Our prior fix for Aurorae window decorations getting visually corrupted did not handle all circumstances, so we pushed a new one that does, which should fully correct the problem for everyone (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)

System Settings no longer crashes when discarding changed settings on the Quick Settings page (David Redondo, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)

Red and blue colors of the cursor are no longer swapped when screencasting in some apps (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)

You’re no longer offered the opportunity to set a screen resolution that, due to the particularities of the active graphics drivers, will cause graphical glitches or crashes (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)

Non-floating panels no longer have an excessively high minimum thickness when using Plasma themes that feature rounded corners with a very large radius (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)

Switching Plymouth boot splash themes now works properly for distros that use mkinitcpio rather than update-initramfs (Antonio Rojas, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)

Fixed a way that the SDDM login screen could freeze for while when using the Breeze SDDM theme (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)

The Baloo file indexing service no longer adds index data for unprintable characters into the database, which could cause apps to crash (Igor Poboiko, Frameworks 5.105. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 14 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 13 last week). Current list of bugs
• 49 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 51 last week). Current list of bugs
• 84 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

Added an autotest to make sure that Bug 465225 does not recur (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)

Changes not in KDE that affect KDE

When using a high refresh rate screen in the X11 session, QML animations no longer go too fast (Someone awesome in Qt, Qt 6.4. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, fast user switching now works (Fabian Vogt, SDDM 0.20. Link)

When using SDDM in native Wayland mode, it no longer inappropriately tries to launch xdg-desktop-portal-kde and causes it to crash in a loop (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, SDDM 0.20. 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

If you’re a developer, consider working on known Plasma 5.27 regressions! You might also want to check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly! You might notice the numbers of VHI and HI bugs being fairly stagnant recently. This is because Plasma’s heavy-hitters are busy with Qt 6 porting right now, leaving them with less time for bugfixing and feature work. Volunteers can help fill in that gap! It really is that simple. 🙂

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!

And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!