Nate Graham, a quality assurance developer in the KDE project, has published another development report on KDE. Additionally, the KDE Plasma 6.4 branch has transitioned to beta testing and the codebase has been frozen to prevent functional changes (only bug fixes are allowed). The release of KDE Plasma 6.4 is scheduled for June 17.
Improvements made in KDE Plasma 6.4 this week before the codebase freeze:
- The KWin compositor now includes support for enabling extended dynamic range brightness for screens that do not support HDR, simulating HDR by adjusting backlight brightness.
- A setting has been added to limit the maximum color depth.
- A widget for HDR calibration has been implemented.
- Applications using XWayland can now manage keyboard and mouse pointer input without requiring confirmation for such operations. By default, this feature is disabled as it reduces system security.
- The System Monitor application has upgraded its overview mode design. A GPU load indicator and charts for available space on individual disks have been added.
- The volume control widget now includes text headers for audio input and output devices.
- The trash widget has been enhanced with a progress indicator for the emptying operation (a rotating spinner).
- Notifications for insufficient free disk space are now reported for all partitions (except for read-only partitions and those full before mounting), not just for / and /home. An option has been added to configure the fill percentage at which warnings will start being issued.
- The built-in RDP server now remembers the credentials provided during authorization to avoid prompting each time. Support for horizontal scroll events from RDP clients has been added.
- KDE Frameworks 6.15 addresses performance issues caused by excessive input/output when displaying thumbnails of directory contents after hovering over them on the desktop or in the Dolphin file manager. KDE Frameworks 6.14.1 fixed a bug that led to crashes of KDE applications based on QtQuick when scrolling content in distributions that include additional build resources.
Previously added changes in KDE Plasma 6.4:
- The Kickoff application menu now includes tags for recently installed programs.
- A warning has been added that appears when an application attempts to access the microphone if the microphone has been set to mute in the settings.
- KMenuEdit now allows configuring the persistent launch of chosen applications on a discrete GPU.
- The configurator has improved the interface of the display settings page. In systems with a single screen, the layout selection area is hidden. In multi-monitor configurations, the current screen is highlighted more effectively, and connected but inactive screens are displayed.
- A new section called 'Animation' has been added to the configurator, where the settings for animated effects have been moved. General effects not related to transition visualization remain in the 'Desktop Effects' section.
- Notification handling has been modified when opening applications in full-screen mode. Instead of ignoring non-critical notifications while working with full-screen programs, the 'Do Not Disturb' mode is now automatically enabled. The distinction is that after exiting full-screen mode, a warning about missed notifications will be shown. This new behavior can be disabled in the settings if desired.
- The system tray now displays information about an unconfigured weather forecast widget.
- In the panel settings dialog, two separate buttons in the header have been converted into a menu, resolving the issue of dialog stretching on systems with localization due to overly long words on buttons.
- On the user management page, a warning is implemented that appears when attempting to delete a user with an active session. Upon confirming such an operation, the files of that user will not be deleted.
- A warning has been added to the system tray settings, displayed when attempting to disable the clipboard management service.
- The design of the dialogs for configuring the clock, dictionary, timer widgets, and showing a slideshow from selected images has been modernized.
- The spacing between the 'Configure' and 'Pin' buttons in the 'Digital Clock' widget window has been increased.
- Support for the Ctrl+Tab and Alt+[number] keyboard shortcuts has been added to the media playback control widget for switching between tabs and sources.
- A playback speed switch has been added to the applet managing the media player using the MPRIS protocol.
- Support for scrolling content in the Widget Explorer using a 'one-finger swipe' gesture on the touchscreen has been implemented.
- A graph has been implemented for a visual evaluation of file copy speed changes. The graph is available on the 'Details' page, which can be accessed from the file copy notification.
- An option to forcibly disable icons of certain applications in the system tray has been added. This new feature can be useful when applications lack internal settings to stop showing indicators (for example, Discord).
- In KRunner, the grouping of search results has been improved – actions related to session and downloads are now included in the prioritized list displayed first. Navigation in KRunner using the keyboard has been enhanced.
- The centering heuristic for widget pop-up windows relative to the screen or panel has been optimized.
- In the panel configuration dialog, the visualization of panel layout templates now reflects the actual position of the panel on the screen.
- Support for using each virtual desktops individual window tiling layout has been added.
- Wayland support has been improved. The stable version of the ext-data-control Wayland protocol required for proper clipboard management has been integrated into the KWin compositor (previously the unstable wlr-data-control-unstable-v1 protocol was used).
- Support for the Wayland ext-idle-notify protocol has been added.
- Support for the Wayland fifo protocol has been added, allowing the use of the FIFO mechanism (first in — first out) for updating the content of the displayed surface. With this protocol, output can rely on waiting for the vertical blanking's completion (vblank) instead of using callback calls every time a new frame is ready to display, solving the problem of high GPU load when using VSync.
- Support for the Wayland xdg-session-management protocol has been added. This change allows for restoring the state of windows from interrupted sessions in environments based on the Wayland protocol, such as in the case of a compositing crash. server or applications.
- In the Wayland-based environment, relative positioning on graphics tablets has been introduced, where the stylus position is determined relative to its previous position, rather than its absolute position on the tablet surface. The ability to control the graphical cursor using the keyboard has also been adapted for work with Wayland.
- The kwin codebase has been split into kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland.
- In KWin, the ability to configure the duration of the "Fade Desktop" effect has been added.
- Support for HDR video in P010 format has been added.
- The accuracy of the Power & Battery widget in displaying the status of Bluetooth device batteries has been improved.
- The use of EncFS for creating new Plasma Vault storage is prohibited (previously created storage based on EncFS will continue to work). The reason cited is the discontinuation of EncFS development and the presence of vulnerabilities in EncFS.
- Support for the xdg portal Clipboard has been added, providing access to the clipboard for applications running in isolated environments, such as those delivered in Flatpak format.
- The performance of recording screencasts using VP9 video format (applied by default) has been significantly improved.
- Interactive buttons in notifications displayed in the notification history pop-up now retain their functionality.
- In multi-monitor configurations, clocks and interactive interface elements on lock and login screens are now displayed only on one active screen and hidden on the other screens that do not have input focus.
- The ability to switch between windows using the Meta+Tab and Meta+Shift+Tab keyboard shortcuts has been implemented.
- For notifications, support for selecting the type of sound alert has been implemented (for instance, a specific sound may play upon receiving an email).
- The set of dark cursors has been renamed to 'Breeze Dark'.
- The window for registering applications with keyboard shortcuts has been redesigned.
- A testing area has been added to the double-click action settings dialog to preview changes before applying them.
- The ability to launch the Discover application manager directly from update notifications has been provided.
- In the clipboard item editing interface, the save button is only activated after the text has been changed.
- The toolkit for browser integration now supports flatpak packages with alternative browsers based on the Chromium and Firefox engines, such as LibreWolf and Ungoogled Chromium.
- Performance has been improved when using night light mode and adjusting brightness (in these modes, frame rates were previously reduced during video playback).
- The system lock screen now allows for a timeout setting for displaying the login prompt.
- The volume control widget now displays the title of the content being played in applications that provide such metadata (for instance, in browsers).
- In the configurator, more intuitive names for key combinations in KWin and Plasma have been used in the hotkey settings section.
- In the configurator on the display settings page, non-integer values for screen refresh rates (e.g., 59.94Hz) are now displayed.
Source: opennet.ru
