KDE Starts December With Numerous Fixes, Other Desktop Refinements

This week saw many fixes landing for the KDE desktop components along with some UI tweaking and other alterations.

This week KDE developer Nate Graham called for KDE to embrace simplicity by default in an effort to appeal to more novice users. He's also been wanting to squash more "annoying bugs" and paper-cuts for the KDE desktop. With this week's development efforts, more KDE bugs were fixed.

Some of the KDE bugs that were addressed this week per Graham's weekly development summary include:

- Under the Plasma Wayland session with KDE Frameworks 5.89, the morphing pop-up effects will now work, which benefits panel tool-tips and the like.

- Improved finding of KDE apps like KWrite/Kate now appearing when searching for "editor" or "notepad" or "programming" while the Dolphin file manager will now appear when searching for "files" or "file manager", among others.

- Plasma 5.23.5 will be faster on log-in for loading panels as well as less visually glitchy while loading the panels.

- Discover will no longer crash when opening a description page for a Flatpak app that was just uninstalled. Discover is also now faster at checking for Flatpak app updates.

- Plasma 5.24 will ensure when adjusting screen brightness on a multi-GPU system that it actually works properly.

- Plasma System Monitor and its widget will no longer show potentially negative numbers for the disk read speed.

- The Ark archiver can now handle Zip archives that contain malformed PHP files.

- Support for drag-and-drop of music and playlist files from the Dolphin file manager to the Elisa music player's playlist panel.

More details on this week's KDE fixes and other changes via this blog post by Nate Graham.