This Week in Plasma: polish and stability

Saturday, 5 April 2025  |  Nate Graham

#This Week in Plasma  

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 was a week of smaller improvements: lots of stability enhancements user interface upgrades. All good preparation for Plasma 6.4, which will be released in a little over two months!

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.4.0

Stocky Notes widgets that live in a panel can now have their pop-up pinned open, just like most other panel pop-ups. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Sticky note widget in panel with popup pinned open

Notifications no longer switch to scientific notation when showing extremely large numbers; now they always show normal numbers. (Nate Graham, link)

Did a round of UI polish on the crash reporting wizard to improve its layout, appearance, and text clarity. (Thomas Duckworth, link)

If you change the cursor blink rate (currently a hidden setting, but we may expose it in the GUI), this preference will now be synced to GTK-based apps too. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

KWin's Zoom effect and Plasma's desktop mouse wheel actions are now much easier to trigger and end by scrolling with a touchpad or a mouse with a high resolution scroll wheel. (Xaver Hugl, link 1 and link 2)

Persistent notifications can now be sent to the notification history in case you don't want to look at them anymore, but keep them around for later, e.g. for timers. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

System tray with notification from KClock showing buttons to reset, pause, or extend the timer, or open the app

Improved the visuals of the portal-based account details request dialog. (Joshua Goins, link)

Dialog requesting access to user account data

Sound themes can now be applied with a double-click, same as other items on System Settings' grid-based theme chooser pages. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Frameworks 6.14

Telegram's System Tray icons are once again Breeze-themed when using the Breeze Icon theme and Telegram version 5.12.4 or later; we had to create some symlinks to react to Telegram changing the icon names they use. (Rocket Aaron and Nate Graham, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.3.4

Fixed a variety of small layout bugs in notifications: now URLs and long words wrap properly; the orange line on critical notifications no longer squares off the normally-rounded bottom-left corner; and internal paddings and spacings have been restored to exactly what they were in Plasma 6.2 and earlier, undoing some small layout changes unintentionally introduced with the big code refactor in Plasma 6.3. (Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, and link 5)

Stack of Plasma notifications showing improved sizing, spacings, and margins

The "Always open with this app" option in portal-based app chooser dialogs now actually works. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Plasma 6.3.5

Fixed a somewhat common Plasma crash related to power-cycling screens in multi-screen setups. (Marco Martin, link)

Fixed a bunch of bugs related to notifications not moving to new positions when they should under various circumstances. (Marco Martin, link)

When using multiple screens, reverting a change to one of the screen's settings no longer makes the UI inappropriately show the settings of the other screen. (Oliver Beard, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

Fixed a case where KWin could crash with misbehaving 3rd-party scripts. (David Redondo, link)

Fixed auto-update in Discover again, as part of a larger package of work to make the notifier tray widget behave more reliably and predictably. (Aleix Pol, link)

Switching pages in Plasma widgets' configuration dialogs no longer inappropriately prompts you to save or discard your changes when there were no changes! (Christoph Wolk, link)

Frameworks 6.13

Fixed a bug in Kirigami that resulted in Plasma widgets' config dialogs and "Get New [thing]" dialogs sometimes missing their header text or buttons. (Marco Martin, Link)

Other bug information of note:

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.4.0

System Monitor and its widgets are now capable of getting statistics from Intel GPUs. (David Redondo, link)

Improved KWin's startup speed a little bit by not having it pointlessly compute font metrics for something that didn't really need to adjust with the font size anyway. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)

Refactored the portal-based dialogs in a way that eliminates an entire class of crashes, both actual and potential. (David Redondo, link)

Made Plasma practically silent in its log output. This project is almost finished! (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, and link 7)

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:

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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