Nate Graham, a quality assurance developer for the KDE project, has published another KDE development report. Additionally, it was announced that the KDE Plasma 6.4 branch has entered beta testing and the code base has been frozen from making functional changes (only accepting patches). The release of KDE Plasma 6.4 is scheduled for June 17.
Improvements made into KDE Plasma 6.4 this week before the code freeze:
- The KWin composite manager has implemented the ability to enable extended dynamic range brightness for screens that do not support HDR, on which HDR is simulated by changing the backlight brightness.
- Added setting to limit maximum color depth
- Implemented widget for HDR calibration.
- Applications using XWayland are given the ability to control the keyboard and mouse pointer without prompting for confirmation of such operations. This feature is disabled by default, as it reduces the security level of the system.
- The overview mode in the System Monitor app has been redesigned, with a GPU load indicator and free space charts for individual drives.
- Added text titles for audio input and output devices to the volume control widget.
- A progress indicator (spinner) has been added to the basket widget.
- Notifications about insufficient free disk space are now displayed for all partitions (except for partitions in read-only mode and those full before mounting), not just for / and /home. The ability to configure the percentage of space that will trigger a warning has been added.
- The built-in RDP server now remembers the permissions granted during authorization, so as not to prompt you every time. Support for horizontal scrolling events from RDP clients has been added.
- KDE Frameworks 6.15 addresses performance issues caused by excessive I/O when displaying thumbnails of directory contents after hovering over them on the desktop or in the Dolphin file manager. KDE Frameworks 6.14.1 addresses a bug that caused QtQuick-based KDE applications to crash when scrolling through contents on distributions that include additional build resources.
Previously added changes in KDE Plasma 6.4:
- Added labels for recently installed programs to the Kickoff application menu.
- Added a warning that is displayed when trying to access the microphone from an application if the microphone is set to silent mode in the settings.
- KMenuEdit now has the ability to configure selected applications to always run on the discrete GPU.
- The display setup page interface has been improved in the configurator. In single-screen systems, the screen layout selection area is now hidden. In multi-monitor configurations, the current screen selection and the presentation of connected but not activated screens have been improved.
- A new section "Animation" has been added to the configurator, where the animated effects settings have been moved. General effects not related to the visualization of the transition from one state to another have been left in the "Desktop effects" section.
- Notification handling has been changed when opening applications in full-screen mode. Instead of ignoring non-critical notifications when working with full-screen programs, the "do not disturb" mode is now automatically enabled. The difference is that after exiting full-screen mode, a warning about missed notifications will be shown. If desired, the new behavior can be disabled in the settings.
- The system tray now shows information about the unconfigured weather widget.
- In the panel settings dialog, two separate buttons in the header have been converted into menus, which has solved the problem with the dialog stretching on localized systems due to too long words on the buttons.
- The user management page now displays a warning when attempting to delete a user with an active session. If you confirm such an operation, the files of such a user will not be deleted.
- A warning has been added to the system tray settings that is displayed when attempting to disable the clipboard management service.
- The design of dialogs for setting up widgets for the clock, dictionary, timer, and displaying a slide show of selected images has been modernized.
- Increased the space between the Customize and Pin buttons in the Digital Clock widget window.
- The Media Controller widget now supports Ctrl+Tab and Alt+[number] key combinations for switching between tabs and sources.
- A playback speed switch has been added to the applet that controls the media player using the MPRIS protocol.
- Added support for scrolling content in Widget Explorer using the one-finger pinch gesture on a touch screen.
- A graph has been implemented for visual assessment of changes in file copying speed. The graph is available on the "Details" page, which can be accessed from the file copying notification.
- Added a setting to forcefully disable icons for certain applications in the system tray. This new feature can be useful when applications do not have internal settings to stop showing indicators (e.g. Discord).
- KRunner has improved search results grouping - session and download related actions are now included in the priority list, which is displayed first. Keyboard navigation in KRunner has been improved.
- Optimized heuristics for centering widget popups relative to the screen or panel.
- In the panel customization dialog, the visualization of panel placement layouts now reflects the actual position of the panel on the screen.
- Added support for use for each virtual desktop its mosaic window layout.
- Improved Wayland support. The KWin composite manager uses a stable version of the Wayland ext-data-control protocol, which is necessary for correct work with the clipboard (previously, the wlr-data-control-unstable-v1 protocol was used).
- Added support for Wayland protocol ext-idle-notify.
- Added support for the Wayland fifo protocol, which allows using a FIFO (first in, first out) mechanism to process the display surface content update queue. Using this protocol, you can output by waiting for the vertical scan (vblank) to complete instead of using callbacks every time you are ready to display a new frame, which solves the problem of high GPU load when using VSync.
- Added support for the xdg-session-management Wayland protocol. This change allows restoring the state of interrupted session windows in Wayland-based environments, for example, in the event of a composite crash. Server or applications.
- The Wayland-based environment now supports relative positioning on graphics tablets, 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 graphics cursor using the keyboard has been adapted for use with Wayland.
- The kwin codebase is split into kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland.
- KWin now allows you to customize the duration of the Fade Desktop effect.
- Added support for HDR video in P010 format.
- Improved accuracy of detection and display of information about the battery status of Bluetooth devices by the Power & Battery widget.
- The use of EncFS for creating new Plasma Vault storages is prohibited (previously created storages based on EncFS will continue to work). The reason given is the discontinuation of EncFS development and the presence of vulnerabilities in EncFS .
- Added support for the xdg Clipboard portal, which provides access to the clipboard for applications running in isolated environments, such as those supplied in the Flatpak format.
- Significantly improved performance of screencast recording using VP9 video format (used by default).
- Interactive buttons are now preserved in notifications shown in the notification history pop-up window.
- In multi-monitor configurations, the clock and interactive UI elements on the lock and login screens are now shown only on the one active screen and hidden on other screens that do not have input focus.
- Implemented the ability to switch between windows using the Meta+Tab and Meta+Shift+Tab key combinations.
- For notifications, support has been implemented for selecting the type of sound notification (for example, when receiving a letter, a separate sound can be played, characteristic of the arrival of a message).
- The dark cursor set has been renamed to "Breeze Dark".
- The window for registering keyboard shortcuts by applications has been redesigned.
- An area for testing a change before applying it has been added to the Double-Click Actions dialog.
- The ability to launch the Discover app manager directly from update notifications has been introduced.
- In the interface for editing elements in the clipboard, the save button is now activated only after the text has been changed.
- The browser integration toolkit now supports flatpak packages with alternative browsers based on Chromium and Firefox engines, such as LibreWolf and Ungoogled Chromium.
- Improved performance when using night light mode and when changing brightness (in these modes, a decrease in frame rate was observed when displaying video).
- The ability to configure the timeout for displaying the login prompt has been added to the system lock screen.
- The volume control widget now shows the title of content playing in applications that expose such metadata (such as browsers).
- In the configurator, in the hotkey settings section, more understandable names of key combinations in KWin and Plasma are used.
- In the configurator, on the page with display parameters, non-integer values of screen refresh are now displayed (for example, 59.94Hz).
Source: opennet.ru
