The KDE Project announced the release and general availability of KDE Frameworks 6.1, which marks the first stable update to the KDE Frameworks 6 series. This series comprises over 80 add-on libraries to Qt and provides commonly used functionality for KDE Plasma 6, the latest desktop environment, and the KDE Gear suite of applications.
The notable features of KDE Frameworks 6.1 include a new filter for the icon chooser dialog, which exclusively displays symbolic icons or omits them entirely, enhanced keyboard navigation in Kirigami sidebars via the GlobalDrawer component, and an expanded “Get new Plasma Widgets” dialog box.
The Plasma System Monitor application has undergone updates to ensure proper display of charts on machines equipped with Intel GPUs that are ten or more years old, optimize the color usage of “Horizontal bars” graphs in various System Monitor widgets, and rectify glitchy horizontal lines on graphs and charts that arose while using different Intel GPUs with a fractional scale factor.
The “Get new [thing]” dialog boxes have been updated to allow sorting by the highest number of downloads. They resolve two issues preventing the correct display of installation progress and causing freezing post-uninstallation of applications, fix a recurring “Unknown Open Collaboration Service API error.(0)” message which appeared during content browsing, enhance support for single-file items, and rectify a visual problem with the layout of the “Overwrite this file?” dialog box.
For applications based on Kirigami, the animation accompanying the transition of apps from one page to another has been further improved with the release of KDE Frameworks 6.1. Additionally, the unseemly line that once separated the sidebar from the content area in the toolbars now has the appearance of a standard toolbar separator line.
When it comes to applications based on QtQuick, KDE Frameworks 6.1 no longer displays animations if they’ve been globally deactivated. This not only resolves overlay issues on the Plasma desktop with disappearing button highlights, but also adds capability for translating menu items in context menus for text fields.
Apart from these improvements, the Breeze-themed radio buttons and checkboxes have been remodelled in order to utilise the “Button” colour role, similar to the rest of the user interface elements. This enhances visual consistency throughout and also addresses a visual glitch seen in QtQuick-based applications.
Various right-click context menu actions throughout KDE apps that open the default terminal app were improved to work as expected, several places icons in the Breeze icon theme and screen chooser OSD icons now respect the current accent color, Breeze icons that can appear in the system tray area now properly change their color when using non-default color schemes.
The Baloo file indexer has been improved for a performance boost by no longer trying to index content on temporarily mounted file systems, such as network shares and OverlayFS mounts. Moreover, a crash was fixed in the Baloo file indexer that could occur after creating or renaming files or folders.
Last but not least, KDE Frameworks 6.1 updates the list of recently accessed files saved to disk by open/save dialogs to be written to the configuration file for volatile state data rather than the user-directed configuration data, and fixes a source of xdg-desktop-portal crashes on boot.
KDE Plasma 6 users are suggested to upgrade to the KDE Frameworks 6.1 version as soon as the packages are available in their GNU/Linux distributions’ stable software repositories for enhanced stability and reliability of their Plasma desktop.
The KDE Frameworks 6.1 is the initial update to Frameworks and is designed to get users ready for the forthcoming KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop environment, which is slated for launch in mid-June 2024, along with the much awaited explicit sync feature. In the meantime, the KDE Project is set to release two more updates, KDE Frameworks 6.2 on May 10th and KDE Frameworks 6.3 on June 7th.
Updated 5 hours ago