This Week in Plasma: The beginnings of Wayland session restore
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 there's big news: at long last, KWin has gained support for the initial version of the Wayland session restore protocol! This work was done by David Edmundson and Vlad Zahorodnii, and lands in Plasma 6.4.
Now, before you go celebrate in the streets, there are some big caveats:
- This version of the protocol only supports window sizing, positioning, and virtual desktop placement.
- It doesn't govern windows saving their internal content yet. That's coming later.
- Toolkits and apps still need to opt in; nothing automatically starts working for free.
But this point is… this stuff is coming soon and in motion! Exciting times.
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.4.0
Overhauled the portal-based shortcut chooser window to look nicer and be easier to use. (David Redondo, link)
The double-click speed chooser now includes a test area you can use to test it out. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
You can now start an update in Discover straight from the notification, without needing to open the app and do it there. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)
When editing a clipboard entry, the "Save" button now only becomes active if there has been a change to the text. (Fushan Wen, link)
Frameworks 6.14
Fixed a case where various messages in System Settings and apps would have links that did nothing when clicked. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.3.5
Fixed several KWin crashes. (Vlad Zahorodnii and Xaver Hugl, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4)
Fixed a glitch affecting people with NVIDIA GPUs that could make the lock screen go black or flicker under certain circumstances. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed a visual glitch with window shadows when using Night Light on certain hardware. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Task Manager "audio is playing" icons specifically are no longer so blurry when using a fractional scale factor. (Marco Martin, link)
Plasma 6.4.0
Clicking on various apps' System Tray icons that want to display a menu on left-click now shows the menu, instead of a weird tiny window in the middle of the screen with one menu item in it. (David Redondo, link)
Re-added the "Edit Contents" global clipboard shortcut that accidentally got removed in Plasma 6.0. (Fushan Wen, link)
Fixed the Select All/None buttons on the Filter page of Plasma's desktop configuration window, which also got broken in Plasma 6.0. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Fixed a few cases where setting or resetting custom icons in the Kicker Application Menu widget didn't work properly. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Fixed a bug where selecting text in XWayland-using apps wouldn't correctly populate the clipboard when using certain clipboard settings. (Fabian Vogt, link)
Fixed auto-updates in Discover even moar betterer! (Yosuke Matsumura, link)
Other bug information of note:
- 1 very high priority Plasma bug (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 20 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 18 last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.4.0
Plasma Browser Integration now supports Chrome and Firefox variants like LibreWolf and Ungoogled Chromium when run in a Flatpak. (Kristen McWilliam, link 1, link 2)
Improved performance when using Night Light and changing the brightness. (Xaver Hugl, link)
The Lock screen now respects the login timeout value coming from PAM, allowing it to be configured. (Akash Suresh, link)
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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