More Improvements Come To KDE Plasma Wayland, KF6 Development Enters Next Phase

KDE developers have had a busy start to 2023 with preparing Plasma 5.27 for release as the final feature version in the Plasma 5 series. Work on Plasma 6.0 and KDE Frameworks 6 continues heating up.

This week saw the release of Plasma 5.27 Beta and there has been a lot of development work still coming for v5.27 as well as preparations for KDE Frameworks 6 and some early feature work that will appear in Plasma 6.0.

KDE Plasma 5.27 Beta

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly development summary with the KDE highlights for the week including:

- Plasma 5.27 is adding the ability to define a custom accent color for the wallpaper rather than relying on an auto/system-generated accent color.

- Plasma 5.27 now allows entering the "Do Not Disturb" mode via the kde-inhibit --notifications command-line option.

- High resolution album art within the Elisa music player is now sharper and better looking when scaled.

- KWin now tries harder to force the smoothest animations by default. This also improves the Intel integrated graphics performance under Plasma Wayland.

- Addressed a possible KWin crash when closing one instance of a multi-instance application while the "dim inactive" effect is used.

- Implemented an older version of the Wayland text-input protocol for Wayland that is used by input methods for Google Chromium and Electron apps.

- Basic sticky keys have now been implemented for the Plasma Wayland session.

More details on this week's changes in the KDE space via Nate's blog.

There is also a blog post today by KDE developer Volker Krause concerning the KDE Frameworks branching. This post goes over the details but now KDE Frameworks 6 development is entering its next phase. All KDE Frameworks 5 releases are now off the "kf5" branch while KDE Frameworks master is tracking what will become KDE Frameworks 6.0.