This Week in Plasma: Plasma 6.4 has arrived!
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 released Plasma 6.4! And so far it’s been getting a really positive reception. The bug reports bear this out; most of the real actual bugs reported against 6.4.0 are either pre-existing issues or minor regressions, many of which we’ve already fixed in time for 6.4.1 coming next Tuesday.
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.4.1
Discover’s list views are now properly navigable with the keyboard. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Improved the text readability in some of the list items in KRunner and Discover when the list items are pressed or clicked. (Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)
Hovering over list items on System Settings’ User Feedback page no longer makes inscrutable icons appear. (Nate Graham, link)
Improved the readability of graph axis labels throughout Plasma so they meet the WCAG AA standard. (Nate Graham, link)
Plasma 6.5.0
Plasma’s Activity manager service now only stores the last 4 months’ worth of history by default, rather than storing all history ever and never pruning it. Setting a limit here makes the data more relevant and prevents performance problems caused by endlessly-growing databases. (Nate Graham, link)
Made further UI improvements to the Emoji Selector app: now the window is never so small that the sidebar list becomes scrollable, and the button to expand and collapse the sidebar is located on the header, rather than inline. (Oliver Beard, link)
Removed the vertical line between the date and time on horizontal arrangements of the Digital Clock widget, since it proved unpopular, and people who want it can get it themselves by using a custom date format anyway. (Owen Ross, link)
On System Settings’ Shortcuts page, the “Add New” button is now located on the top toolbar rather than taking up unnecessary space above the list view. (Jakob Petsovits, link)
Reduced the minimum size of Custom Tiling tiles, so that you can have smaller ones on particularly large screens like ultra-wides. (Tyler Slabinski, link)
The Networks widget’s captive portal banner now uses the inline/header styling, reducing the frames-within-frames effect. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Removed the NOAA Weather Picture Of The Day wallpaper plugin, because unfortunately the source data changed in a way that makes it no longer consistently suitable for being displayed on the desktop. (Kat Pavlů, link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.3.6
Fixed a bug that could sometimes cause keyboard shortcuts to get lost on certain distros when performing system upgrades. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed a regression that caused KRunner’s faded completion text to sometimes overflow from the window. (Nate Graham, link)
Fixed a small visual regression in KWin’s “Slide Back” effect. (Blazer Silving, link)
Plasma 6.4.1
Fixed several issues in the Folder View widget that caused selecting or opening items to not work when using certain non-default view settings, or when the view was scrollable, or when using a touchscreen. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Fixed a bug in the Meta+V clipboard popup that made it sometimes fail to pre-select the top-most item. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)
The Clipboard settings window’s shortcuts page no longer shows columns for local shortcuts that you can confusingly set and have them do nothing, because the clipboard is global in scope. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)
Fixed the Earth Science Picture of The Day wallpaper plugin after the source data changed its formatting again. (Kat Pavlů, link)
Made a few fixes to the “Missing Backends” section of Discover’s settings window that prevented it from working quite right. (Carl Schwan, link)
Fixed a bug that prevented direct scan-out (and its attendant performance benefits) from activating on rotated screens. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed a bug that could cause the system to lock or suspend more quickly than intended after an app that was blocking those activities stops doing so. (Akseli Lahtinen. link)
Installing a new wallpaper plugin no longer causes the plugin list combobox to become blank. (Nate Graham, link)
Frameworks 6.16
Fixed a regression that caused System Settings’ sidebar list items to display hover tooltips when they weren’t needed. (Nate Graham, link)
Other bug information of note:
- 3 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 26 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 23 last week). Current list of bugs
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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