This collects all the tasks we need to carry out to successfully announce Plasma 5.27.

Dates

Feature freeze: 5 Jan.
Beta: 19 Jan.
Release date: 14 Feb.

To-do

• Collect stuff
• Think up a slogan
• Decide which features and advantages to focus on
  1. ...
  2. ...
• Get new wallpaper
• Write announcement
• Design and create announcement page
• Create video
• Write/Design social media posts

Topics

• "With Hebrew calendar added to Plasma, Plasma is now blessed by mysterious powerful forces. Hope the feature can be announced in the 5.27 release announcement because it seems many people still don't know alternate calendar is available in Plasma." https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kdeplasma-addons/-/merge_requests/313

Nate's blog

Pretty in Plasma

• Wallpaper creators can now define a custom accent color for their wallpaper that will be automatically used when the user is using the “Wallpaper from accent color” feature, rather than letting the system calculate an accent color automatically https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/2084
• KWin now tries its best to force the smoothest animations by default (the balance of smoothness vs latency is user-configurable) which improves performance on integrated Intel GPUs in the Plasma Wayland session https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/3420
• When using a “Picture of the Day” wallpaper, there’s now a little warning for providers that might use NSFW images as their pictures of the day https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=399126
• Tiling system : KWin got a very cool new feature this week: a built-in advanced tiling system that you can use to set up custom tile layouts and resize multiple adjacent windows at a time by dragging on the gaps between them! This feature is still in its infancy and not designed to completely replicate the workflow of a tiling window manager. But we expect it to grow and advance over time, and also the new APIs added for it should benefit 3rd-party tiling scripts that do want to let you turn KWin into a tiling window manager. Thanks very much to Marco Martin for contributing this work, which will be released in Plasma 5.27! https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/2560 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=438788
• Breeze-themed windows now have a subtle outline around them, which not only looks classy as hell, but it also helps keep dark-themed windows from blending into one another https://invent.kde.org/plasma/breeze/-/merge_requests/241
• You now get a nice full-screen blend effect when you manually change Plasma themes https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/2199

Discover

• Discover now helps you out when you do a search in a category page for something not in that category https://bugs.kde.org/462809
• Discover now has a SteamOS backend, so it can perform system updates on Steam Deck devices from within desktop mode https://invent.kde.org/plasma/discover/-/merge_requests/410
• When using offline updates, you can now use Discover to see the changelogs for individual packages, just like you can with online updates https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457534
• Discover now has a brand-new homepage design with dynamically-updating categories that shows popular apps, and a new set of featured apps that showcase the best of KDE (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Carl Schwan, me: Nate Graham, and Devin Lin, Plasma 5.27 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/discover/-/merge_requests/398

KRunner

• The way KRunner displays information about time zones has been substantially improved, making it easier to parse the output, and fixing a couple of bugs https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kdeplasma-addons/-/merge_requests/292
• When a KRunner search matches nothing, you’ll now be given the opportunity to do a web search for the search term https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/2311
• KRunner got a lot smarter about its search results. For years people have complained about various things not being the top item when they expect it, so Natalie Clarius and Alexander Lohnau decided to make some major improvements https://invent.kde.org/plasma/systemsettings/-/merge_requests/165 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/2177 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kdeplasma-addons/-/merge_requests/260 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=460796 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=461241
• “Running” (i.e. clicking on or pressing the return key for) dictionary definition entries in KRunner’s results list now copies the definition text to the clipboard, and even sends a system notification about this so you know that it happened https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=460590

System Settings

• Various System Settings pages now use our more modern frameless style https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/merge_requests/1341 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/flatpak-kcm/-/merge_requests/18
• System Settings’ Shortcuts page now features a significantly more obvious and useful UI for adding custom commands! https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/merge_requests/1253
• System Settings’ Launch Feedback page is no more, and everything on it has been moved into a popup accessible from the Cursors page, with an actual explanation of what the settings do https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/2466 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/merge_requests/531 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/2471#note_588716
• The “Highlight Changed Settings” button that currently lives on a footer in the System Settings sidebar has been moved to the hamburger menu to streamline the UI https://invent.kde.org/plasma/systemsettings/-/merge_requests/177
• Info Center can now show you OpenCL info on its own new dedicated page, if you have the clinfo utility installed https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kinfocenter/-/merge_requests/124
• There’s now a new “Touchscreen” page in System Settings that lets you disable touchscreens and choose which physical screen their input gets mapped to https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/merge_requests/1227
• System Settings’ Drawing ‘Tablet’ page now lets you map physical buttons on your drawing tablet’s pen to keyboard shortcuts https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/merge_requests/1229
• All of the global volume settings have been moved into the System Settings Audio Volume page, and the Audio Volume widget no longer has a separate settings page of its own. So clicking its configure button now takes you to System Settings. In addition, this has provided the opportunity to make the global mute feature truly global, and also make the sliders on the System Settings page only go up to 150% when you’re using the “Raise maximum volume” setting https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-pa/-/merge_requests/145 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=418713 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=458977

Panel, Tray & Widgets

• You can now show the Hebrew Calendar in your Digital Clock popup’s calendar if you want https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=463869
• The Display Configuration widget now appears in the System Tray by default–inactive when you only have one screen or you have a multi-monitor desktop setup, and active when you have a laptop with one or more external screens connected. This makes it easier to quickly change those screens’ settings if needed https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kscreen/-/merge_requests/172 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kscreen/-/merge_requests/173
• In the Media Player widget, you can now swipe up/down to change the volume, and left/right to change the playback position https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/2438
• When pasting links into a Notes widget using the standard Paste action, they are now pasted as clickable links by default. And if you want to remove formatting, there’s a new context menu item for that too! https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kdeplasma-addons/-/merge_requests/303 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kdeplasma-addons/-/merge_requests/310
• It’s now possible to configure the Color Picker widget to display up to 9 color preview dots for quick use (in case you didn’t know, you can drag colors out of them and onto something else), or none at all if you don’t use them because you use the widget as just a way to get color code values into your clipboard https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kdeplasma-addons/-/merge_requests/293
• You can now drag an image onto the Color Picker widget to make it calculate the average color for that image and store it in its list of stored colors https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kdeplasma-addons/-/merge_requests/249
• In the Color Picker plasmoid, left-clicking a color now copies it to the clipboard, and you’ll also see a small “Copied!” message to help you visually confirm what happened https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457311
• You can now reverse the ordering of tasks in the Plasma Task Manager widget on vertical panels, to complement existing support on horizontal panels https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/merge_requests/1301
• The Bluetooth widget’s tooltip now shows the battery status for any connected device that are able to report battery information https://invent.kde.org/plasma/bluedevil/-/merge_requests/105
• The Battery and Brightness and Media Player widgets’ tooltips now indicate that you can do something by scrolling over them. This should be all of them! https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/commit/537f50a397eee64718806686d5a5045bd1112eab https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/2414
• The System Tray config window’s list of applets has been made fully keyboard-navigable and accessible https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=434432
• System Monitor (and widgets of the same name) can now detect and monitor power usage for NVIDIA GPUs https://invent.kde.org/plasma/ksystemstats/-/merge_requests/43
• You can now show the current temperature in a badge overlay on the Weather widget’s icon–both outside of the System Tray and also for the System Tray version of it! https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kdeplasma-addons/-/merge_requests/268
• You can now middle-click the Networks icon to toggle Airplane Mode on and off https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-nm/-/merge_requests/166
• System Tray Widgets that can be middle-clicked to toggle something about them on or off now indicate as such in their tooltips https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/2205 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/bluedevil/-/merge_requests/101

Wayland

• In the Plasma Wayland session, KWin now sends along pen tilt and rotation events to apps https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/3364
• Gained support for the Global Shortcuts portal, which allows apps on Wayland to offer a standardized user interface for setting and editing global shortcuts https://invent.kde.org/plasma/xdg-desktop-portal-kde/-/merge_requests/80
• The Plasma Wayland session now supports high resolution scroll wheels for smoother scrolling through long views https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457556

Plasma for Powerusers

• You can now enter Do Not Disturb mode using the command line by running kde-inhibit --notifications https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kde-cli-tools/-/merge_requests/45
• You can now move a single window to another activity using the titlebar context menu https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=440036
• You can now autostart apps multiple times (e.g. to launch multiple instances of it) and it also shows you the paths where autostarted scripts live https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/1782
• KMenuEdit and the properties dialog now make it easy for you to set environment variables when opening your apps. This was always possible, but you had to know the secret special syntax (e.g. Exec=env FOO=1 kate); now the UI makes it easy and explicitly supported https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kio/-/merge_requests/1025 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kmenuedit/-/merge_requests/11
• While on the lock screen, you can now hit the Escape key to turn off the screen and save some power https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338796