This Week in Plasma: HDR calibration wizard
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 the hard feature freeze came into effect, so Plasma 6.4’s feature-set is now finalized! There’s a lot of great stuff in this release, a summary of which can be found here.
A few of those items were added this week, as they were deemed to have had a long enough development time that it was okay to get them in after the soft feature freeze. And with that, the bug-fixing and UI polishing period begins!
On that subject, don’t be alarmed by the number of high and very high priority bugs rising; we’re using these lists to guide our bug-fixing efforts for the next month, so expect the numbers to go up and down and all around for a little while.
Notable new Features
Plasma 6.4.0
Added an HDR calibration wizard! (Xaver Hugl, link)
KWin now allows you to enable “Extended Dynamic Range” on displays that support it, which makes them simulate HDR by strategically changing the backlight’s brightness. (Xaver Hugl, link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)
KWin now allows you to limit the maximum color depth on screens that support this feature. (Xaver Hugl, link 1, link 2, link 3 and link 4)
You can now allow XWayland-using apps to control the keyboard and pointer, which of course decreases security, but some of those apps rely on this behavior to work. Now you can choose for yourself which one of those you care more about. (David Redondo, link)
Plasma’s built-in free space notifier now warns you about low free space on any partition, not just / and /home. It has some intelligence to ignore partitions that are read-only or were mounted in an already mostly-full state, to avoid annoying you into wanting to throw your computer out the window. You can now also configure the percentage at which it starts to warn you. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.3.6
Improved the way keyboard navigation works throughout the System Tray widget’s popup to be more conventional. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Plasma 6.4.0
System Monitor’s Overview page now includes more relevant monitors front-and-center, including for GPU usage and individual disk capacities. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
On Wayland, sticky keys now get un-latched on click, the same way they do on X11. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Enabling Plasma’s built-in RDP server now asks for authorization once, and then after you grant it, you don’t get annoyed by this again. (Harald Sitter, link)
That same built-in RDP server now accepts horizontal scroll events from connected client apps. (Jack Xu, link)
Made significant improvements to the Comics widget with respect to its configuration dialog and messaging and in an unconfigured or error state. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2)
In the Audio Volume widget, the sections for audio input and output devices now have little textual headers, like many others throughout Plasma and KDE apps do. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Added a little contextual help button to System Settings’ Mouse page that explains what the middle-mouse-button scrolling feature does, since it’s otherwise not very obvious. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Improved the way screen readers announce scrollable views in System Settings. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Trash widgets now show a little busy spinner while being emptied, because sometimes emptying the trash can take a while, and otherwise you’re just staring at it doing nothing, wondering if it’s broken until it finally completes. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
The hover buttons for items in the clipboard now feature the “Edit” button first, since it’s likely to be the one you want to use most often. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Spectacle’s recording notifications no longer linger in the history, because they’ve lost relevance right after you’ve seen them. (Noah Davis, link)
The Kickoff Application launcher’s footer button to show more power and/or session actions now always reflects what’s in it, rather than only sometimes doing so. (Nate Graham, link)
Removed all the tooltips that appear when you hover over labels on System Settings’ Mouse and Touchpad pages, because they just duplicated the visible text with minimal or no differences. Instead, only the things that actually need explanation now get it using the more common contextual help button UI. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Removed the “Disable this Popup” menu item that appears on pop-up clipboard actions, because these are off by default now, which means if you’ve gone to the trouble of turning them on, you actually want to see them and already know how to turn them off! (Nate Graham, link)
Frameworks 6.15
The dialog that asks if you want to open or run an executable file, which you can invoke from Dolphin or Plasma, now makes the "don’t ask again" option much clearer so you actually know what you’er agreeing to! (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.3.6
Removed the pointless “Mount” action for audio CDs and blank optical disks in general from the Disks & Devices widget. (Bogdan Onofriuchuk, link)
Plasma 6.4.0
Fixed a case where Spectacle could crash with certain screen arrangements. (Noah Davis, link)
Fixed some bugs on the desktop Locations page that made some of its settings not work. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Plasma OSDs and the panel configuration dialog are now laid out properly (i.e. reversed) when using a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Oliver Beard, link 1 and link 2)
Fixed a bug that caused notifications to now appear on a large Notifications widget placed on the desktop or in a thicccccc panel. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Typing an absurdly, impractically long number into the “Show last” spinbox on System Monitor chart dialogs no longer allows it to eventually overflow off the page if you decide for some reason to keep on typing. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Fixed an esoteric bug that caused window titlebar context menus’ sub-menus to be mis-rendered on first appearance when there’s a secondary monitor to the left of the primary one. (Vlad Zahorodnii. link)
Fixed a bug that caused the previews in the wallpaper chooser view to sometimes not visually reflect the aspect ratio of the screen that the wallpaper will be applied to. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Frameworks 6.14.1
Fixed a bug that caused practically all QtQuick-based KDE software to crash when you scroll when using a distro that turned on asserts for user builds. (Noah Davis, link)
Fixed a bug in the new KWallet backend implementation that caused Chromium-based apps to hang for 60 seconds on launch if you’ve intentionally disabled KWallet. (Marco Martin, link)
Frameworks 6.15
Search and password fields throughout Plasma and KDE apps are now laid out properly (i.e. reversed) when using a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)
Other bug information of note:
- 4 very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 1 last week). Current list of bugs
- 22 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 20 last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Frameworks 6.15
Fixed a performance issue in Plasma, Dolphin, and anywhere else that shows folder thumbnails that could cause excessive disk I/O usage when hovering over a folder showing thumbnails of its contents. (Akseli Lahtinen, 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.
Newsletter
Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.