This Week in Plasma: Wayland PiP and accessibility!
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 finished polishing up Plasma 6.4 for release, and started to turn our heads to bigger topics — notably including Wayland protocols and accessibility!
Notable New Features
Plasma 6.5.0
Implemented support for an experimental version of the Wayland picture-in-picture protocol that allows apps also implementing it (such as Firefox) to finally display proper PiP windows in advance of the upstream version of the protocol eventually being merged. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.3.6
Reduced the rate at which the “visual bell” accessibility feature can flash the screen so there’s no way it can cause seizures. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Plasma 6.4.0
Made the Kicker Application Menu widget able to horizontally scroll for searches that return results from many KRunner plugins, so you have the opportunity to see them all. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Plasma 6.4.1
Improved text contrast for labels used in subtitles or other secondary roles throughout Plasma. (Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, and link 7)
Discover’s search field now trims all whitespace, to prevent errors when copy-pasting text that ends in a space or something. (Nate Graham, link)
Plasma 6.5.0
In System Settings, moved the Invert and Zoom settings into the Accessibility page, which is a more sensible place for them than the Desktop Effects page was. (Oliver Beard, link 1, link 2, and link 3)
Merged KWin’s Background Contrast effect into the Blur effect, since neither makes to turn on or off without the other. (Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2)
On Wayland, virtual desktops can now be re-ordered from the Pager widget, and re-ordering them in the Overview effect’s grid view now re-orders them in the Pager widget too. (Marco Martin and Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1, link 2, and link 3)
Spectacle now makes it clearer that you can end a screen recording by pressing the same keyboard shortcut you used to start it, by telling you this in the notification and also by using clearer names for the global shortcuts. (Noah Davis, link)
The Breeze application style’s animated effects for clicking checkboxes and radio buttons now work in QtQuick-based apps and System Settings pages as well. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
The Disks & Devices, Networks, and Bluetooth widgets now use standard-style section headers. (Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, and link 3)
Improved the searching UX in the Emoji Selector app: now the search field is always visible, and doing a search will always search through the full set of all emojis if there aren’t any matches on the current page. (Nate Graham, link 1, link 2)
The Display Configuration widget and OSD no longer thinks your primary screen is always connected to a laptop; now it uses more generic terminology. (Nate Graham, link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.3.6
Using a non-default font or font size no longer causes the selection rectangles for files or folders on the desktop to be displayed at the wrong size and cause subtle layout and positioning glitches. (Nate Graham, link)
Plasma 6.4.0
Fixed several more cases where putting a widget on a huge panel could cause Plasma to freeze. (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, and link 7)
Fixed a case where Discover could crash while offering you the replacement for an end-of-support Flatpak app. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)
Fixed a bug that caused the Open/Save dialogs invoked from Flatpak-based browsers (or when forcing the use of portal-based dialogs) to sometimes not allow the preview pane to be opened. (David Redondo, link)
Fixed a weird bug that could cause a standalone Folder View widget on the desktop to become visually glitchy when you drag files or folders to it from Dolphin. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)
Fixed a bug that broke printing at the correct sizes in Flatpak-packaged GTK apps. (David Redondo, link)
Installing or uninstalling an app no longer unexpectedly clears the search field and results view in Kicker or Kickoff if they happened to be visible at the moment the transaction completed. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Frameworks 6.15
Fixed a cause of crashes in apps and Plasma system services using System Monitor charts. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
Frameworks 6.16
Fixed an intermittent source of crashes in System Monitor when switching process views. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
Fixed a weird issue that could cause Open/ Save dialogs to close when hovering over certain files. (David Redondo, link)
KDE Gear 25.04.3
Fixed an issue that could cause the thumbnailer to crash on X11 when using certain widget styles. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Other bug information of note:
- 3 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 23 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 21 last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.4.0
Improved startup speed for System Monitor by loading the column configuration dialog’s content on-demand, rather than at launch. (David Edmundson, link)
Made sure that the Environment Canada data source for weather reports keeps working, since the provider is changing their data format soon and we needed to adapt. (Ismael Asensio, link)
Frameworks 6.15
Improved startup speed for System Monitor by loading the tree view indicator arrows on demand, rather than at launch. (David Edmundson, 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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