KDE’s Plasma Mobile Gets Ported to KDE Frameworks 6 and Qt 6

Many improvements were added for the homescreen, quicksettings, task switcher, notifications, and core apps.
KDE's Plasma Mobile 6

KDE’s Plasma Mobile desktop interface for mobile devices is currently going through a lot of work as the team continues porting it to the upcoming KDE Frameworks 6 software suite and the latest Qt 6 open-source applications framework.

While the KDE Project is also working hard on the Plasma 6 desktop environment series, Plasma Mobile users will be happy to learn that repository for Plasma Mobile packages was already ported to KDE Frameworks 6 and Qt 6.

But during this porting a lot of things were rewritten and improved, including the brightness slider in the action drawer for smoother user interaction, the task switcher, which is now a KWin effect and can be opened if there’s no apps running, and the audio overlay to open much faster when pressing the audio buttons on your device.

The homescreen has been improved as well to support keyboard navigation on the Halcyon homescreen (whose placeholder arrow’s direction was reversed following user feedback) and on homescreen’s search component, and the animation is now smoother when the screen is unlocked.

Plasma Mobile also received a new system process that manages specific configurations, support for hiding the screen rotation quicksetting when screen rotation is not available on the device, a new quicksetting to manage network hotspots, as well as the ability to disable and enable individual quicksettings from the Settings app.

Other than that, the hotspot settings module was ported to modern design components and window decorations have been turned on by default when a window is moved to an external display.

Several core Plasma Mobile apps have been updated with new features and other changes. For example, the Plasma Dialer app gets notifications for missed calls, the Spacebar SMS client now supports proxies, and the Plasma Phonebook address book got support for mobile forms on the add contact page and contact details, as well as a new design for the overlay action buttons.

Many other apps were improved as well, such as the Arianna eBook reader, which got a settings dialog, the Tokodon Mastodon client, which now supports proxies and polls, the NeoChat Matrix client, which gets inline message editing and a new command to send a knock event to a room, and the PlasmaTube YouTube client, which got a completely revamped media player and rounded thumbnails.

Most of these app improvements will be available next month as part of the KDE Gear 23.04 software suite, while others will arrive later this year with the KDE Gear 23.08 release. For more details about KDE’s Plasma Mobile latest developments as part of Plasma 6, check out this blog post.

Image credits: KDE Project

Last updated 1 year ago

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