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This Week in Plasma: inhibit sleep while transferring files

Saturday, 10 May 2025  |  Nate Graham

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 Plasma 6.4’s “soft feature freeze” came into effect, which means we stop merging new features unless they’ve been in development for months and are alllllmost ready. So focus has shifted to bug-fixing and UI polishing.

You may also notice that quite a lot of changes in Plasma this week actually came from KDE Frameworks. It’s a good reminder that these frameworks underpin everything KDE makes — the unsung infrastructural heroes quietly and boringly making other work possible.

Notable new Features

Frameworks 6.16

The “New File” and “New Folder” dialogs you can invoke from Plasma, Dolphin, and other KDE apps have been given visual overhauls. In addition, the folder dialog lets you choose a custom icon from right there in the dialog! (Kai Uwe Broulik, link 1 and link 2)

New folder creation dialog showing the ability to set a custom icon using a grid of colored folder icons
New file creation dialog with preview

Transferring files in Plasma and KDE apps now inhibits suspend, so the transfer can’t get unexpectedly interrupted or canceled in the middle if the computer goes to sleep. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.4.0

On the Audio Volume widget’s Applications page, the name of the media being played will now be shown — as long as the app sets this properly! This is helpful for web browsers in particular. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Audio Volume widget showing two audio streams from the LibreWolf web browser, distinguished by different media titles

On System Settings’ Shortcuts page, KWin and Plasma’s shortcuts are now shown under nicer and more human-friendly names. (Nate Graham, link)

System Settings Shortcuts page showing nicer names for the KWin and Plasma entries

System Settings’ Display & Monitor page now shows non-integer refresh rates, like “59.94Hz”. (Xaver Hugl, link)

System Settings’ Accessibility page now uses a better icon for the Screen Reader category. (Christoph Wolk, link)

SCreen reader page showing more appropriate icon that depicts a speaker and speech bubble

Windows that make an oopsie and forgot to set a title now display no text in Overview, rather than a tiny little empty bubble where there should be text. (Nate Graham, link)

The “Minimize All Windows” widget no longer inappropriately pretends to be a “Peek at Desktop” widget while in edit mode. (Nate Graham, link)

Frameworks 6.16

Overhauled the technical infrastructure of how icons are drawn by Kirigami throughout Plasma and QtQuick-based KDE apps, fixing several visual issues related to the active highlighting not working properly — particularly with dark color schemes and image-based icons. (Arjen Hiemstra, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Files in remote network locations accessed by their URL (not a manual local mount) from Plasma or any KDE apps now do a better job of showing thumbnails when they’re really large, and should be more robust and reliable in general, less likely to make the displaying app crash (Akseli Lahtinen and John Chadwick, link 1 and link 2)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.3.5

Fixed a case where KWin could crash when disconnecting a Thunderbolt dock. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Interacting with apps using a drawing tablet stylus is now more reliable. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Plasma 6.3.6

Fixed a case where KWin could crash while drawing windows with no window decorations. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Theme previews on System Settings’ Colors page that use the full tinting feature are now displayed properly. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

When using any of the automatic sorting modes for desktop icons, creating a new file on the desktop now inserts the file in its correct place based on the chosen sort order, rather than putting the new item under the cursor and resetting the sort order to “Manual”. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

Fixed a case where KWin could occasionally get frozen during playback of full-screen YouTube videos in Firefox. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed another case of optical discs appearing duplicated in the Disks & Devices widget. (Bogdan Onofriuchuk, link)

KWin’s “Move to Center” action once again works irrespective of whether the window being moved to the center is currently quarter-tiled. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

It’s no longer possible to hilariously scroll the text of Plasma notifications horizontally using a touchpad, making it slide out of view! Now it stays put. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Frameworks 6.16

Fixed a bug in KConfig that could, under certain circumstances, prevent Plasma from loading when compiled with asserts turned on. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Fixed a bug in the Breeze theme that made certain icons appear at too large a size in certain GTK apps. (Christoph Cullmann, link)

Fixed the Breeze microphone icon to not be off-center in its 22px version. (Nate Graham, link)

Other bug information of note:

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.3.6

Fixed an issue preventing the “Prefer color accuracy” setting from working while watching full-screen videos. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Made the day/night transition time calculations of the Night Light feature more accurate by using a dedicated solar transit simulator. (Vlad Zahorodnii, 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:

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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