KDE Plasma 6.0 Ready For Release Next Week, Plasma 6.1 Seeing Early Feature Work

It's hard to believe we are already just down to a few days left before the release of Plasma 6.0 next week alongside KDE Frameworks 6 and KDE Gear apps ported over to the Qt6 toolkit. KDE Plasma 6.0 is pretty much primed for release while already fixes are beginning for Plasma 6.0.1 as well as early feature work underway for Plasma 6.1.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly development summary. Being so close to the Plasma 6.0 release next week, much of the activity is already focused on the first point release and beginning to code up features for Plasma 6.1 in beginning to leverage the modern Plasma 6 base. Some of the KDE highlights for the week include:

- KDE Plasma 6.1 will introduce a "fake session restore" mode that re-opens apps that were had at the last logout and relies on them to have internally saved their own state. This fake session restore support is working toward eventually having real session restore support for KDE Plasma on Wayland.

- Plasma 6.1's Overview and Present window effect has consolidated down to one layout algorithm that should present/arrange windows better than before.

- Bluetooth headsets that report battery status can now show a nice icon in all the places within Plasma that report showing battery status.

- The desktop context menu item of "Refresh" has been dropped since it's infrequently used and doesn't always fix most problems. But hitting F5 will work still for manual refresh.

- Connecting iPhone/Apple devices to the system using a cable and with an apostrophe in the device's name will now work with kio-extras 24.02.

- KWin 6.0's zoom effect can now fully zoom into all areas of complex multi-screen setups.

- Plasma 6.0.1 will fix a KWin crash that could occur when using the older NVIDIA 340 series proprietary driver.

- Backported for Plasma 5.27.11 is fixing the most common KWin crash on X11 that happened when the screen arrangement changed.

- The Dolphin 24.05 file manager will see faster start-up time in the range of 2~17%.

More details on these changes for this final week prior to the Plasma 6.0 premiere, see Nate's blog.