KDE Plasma 6 Alpha Approaches Next Week With The Soft Feature Freeze

The KDE Plasma 6 Alpha release is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, 8 November, along with the soft feature freeze for Plasma 6.0 at that time.

The hard feature freeze isn't until a few weeks later with the KDE Plasma 6.0 Beta 1 release scheduled for 29 November, but in any event feature work on Plasma 6.0 is beginning to wind down. KDE developer Nate Graham published his usual weekly recap of all the interesting developments taking place for KDE in the lead-up to the Plasma 6.0 Alpha release.

Some of the changes to land this week include:

- A better way to present app ratings within KDE Discover as well as Discover's search being greatly improved upon.

- The System Settings Energy Saving panel has been rewritten in QML.

- Pen input using a graphics tablet can now be manually remapped to the entire screen area.

- Transient dialog windows are now handled in the Plasma Wayland session like they are on X11.

- Ark can now extract multi-volume ZIP files.

- One of the most common crashes within Plasma when changing audio settings in System Settings has been fixed.

- Fixed a very subtle threading bug that could cause Plasma or KWin to randomly crash.

- Various other fixes.

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