This Week in Plasma: zero VHI bugs and much more
Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in Plasma"! Every week we cover the highlights of what's happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.
This week we drilled into the outstanding bug lists, and drove the number of HI and VHI priority bugs down to their lowest ever numbers! In addition, we boosted performance, made high-visibility improvements to notification history and screen locking, implemented support for multiple cross-desktop standards, and way more! So, quite a big week.
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.4.0
Notifications in the history popup now retain their interactive buttons, if they have any. If they don't but clicking on their background normally does something when they're in pop-up form, then they'll show an "Activate" button when in the history. (Dominique Hummel and Kai Uwe Broulik, link 1 and link 2)
On the lock and login screens, The clock and interactive UI elements are now only shown on one screen at a time when using a multi-screen setup; they fade out on screens without the pointer or keyboard focus, leaving those screens free to display pretty wallpapers. (Yifan Zhu, link 1 and link 2)
System Settings' Display Configuration page gained some UI Improvements; now the screen arrangement view is hidden when there's only one screen, and with more that one, there's a big obvious screen chooser at the top of the page to make it clear which screen is selected, and when there are any disabled but connected screens. (Oliver Beard, link)
Improved the appearance of the Comics widget when it hasn't been set up with any comics yet, or when there's been an error of some kind. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2)
You can now also use Meta+Tab and Meta+Shift+Tab to switch between windows, in addition to the current shortcuts. This supports our push to have all global actions include the Meta key for at least one of their shortcuts. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
KWin's "Fade Desktop" virtual desktop switching effect now has a customizable duration. (Konstantin Kharlamov, link)
Plasma's Notifications now respect requests to play sounds using "sound hints". (Ruslan Khabibullin, link)
The Breeze cursor theme with dark cursors is now named "Breeze Dark", and vice versa for the ones with light cursors. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.3.4
Fixed the most common Plasma crash! This one could happen when unplugging screens, especially with a dock involved in the process somewhere. This was the final VHI priority bug! (David Edmundson, link)
Fixed the remaining causes of two common KWin crashes. (Xaver Hugl, link 1 and link 2)
Fixed a severe crash in Breeze-themed apps that we accidentally introduced in Plasma 6.3.3 alongside a change to fix a bug with color scheme support for creative color schemes. The change itself was fine, but it exposed a pre-existing issue that was also benign on its own. When the two combined… kaboom. But no more, now that it's fixed! (Albert Astals Cid, link)
Fixed a clipboard bug that caused non-ASCII text from items re-ordered in the history to become mangled when pasted. (Fushan Wen, link)
Fixed a bug that made it impossible to remove previously-added languages on System Settings' Region and Language page. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Fixed a bug that made Discover sometimes fail to show the current version of an app or package being updated to a newer one. (Ismael Asensio, link)
Fixed a visual glitch affecting auto-hiding top-positioned fit-content panels. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Plasma 6.4.0
Fixed several issues in the desktop & wallpaper settings window that prevented certain pages from being scrollable when the content was long. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2)
Notifications created by apps using the Notifications portal that specify something to happen when clicked now actually perform that action. (Kylie CT, link)
Fixed the System Tray's adherence to the part of the StatusNotifierItem spec that allows tray icons to ask to display a context menu on left-click. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Flatpak apps from non-standard user-defined repositories are now shown on System Settings' Flatpak Permissions page. (Harald Sitter, link)
Fixed a bug that broke scrolling on certain scrollable views in the Application Dashboard widget. (Tomislav Pap, link)
When using the "Choose Player Automatically" feature of the Media Player widget, the actual name of the player is now shown on the lock screen (when using the feature to show media information on the lock screen) instead of the text "Choose Player Automatically". (Fushan Wen, link)
Fixed a bug that prevented the Media Frame widget from pausing the slideshow when hovered with the pointer, as it was originally intended to do. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Other bug information of note:
- Zero very high priority Plasma bugs! (3 last week). Current list of bugs
- 18 15-minute Plasma bugs (21 last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.4.0
Massively improved performance when making screen recordings in Spectacle using the VP9 video format, which is used by default. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
Implemented support for the wp_fifo_v1 Wayland protocol. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Implemented support for the Clipboard Portal. (David Redondo, link)
Made KWin more resilient against the issue of windows moving to strange positions when changing the screen arrangement or number of screens. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Plasma's log output is pretty quiet now thanks to Christoph's hard work. Nonetheless, he continued that work to help get us to zero! (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, link 9, and link 10)
How You Can Help
KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.
You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine!
You don’t have to be a programmer, either. Many other opportunities exist:
- Triage and confirm bug reports, maybe even identify their root cause
- Contribute designs for wallpapers, icons, and app interfaces
- Design and maintain websites
- Translate user interface text items into your own language
- Promote KDE in your local community
- …And a ton more things!
You can also help us by making a donation! Any monetary contribution — however small — will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.
To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.
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