This Week in Plasma: chugging along
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 continued polishing up Plasma 6.4 in response to feedback. There’s also lots of work to report improving the UI for Plasma 6.5 in a few months, as well as work on larger topics happening in the background that’s still in progress. Stay tuned!
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.4.3
The automatic screen scale calculator on Wayland will no longer give you a default scale factor that’s only a little bit higher than 100%, as these scale factors often result in a lot of blurriness. Now it will instead round the calculated default scale factor down to 100% if it would otherwise be only a little bit higher. (Nate Graham, link)
Plasma 6.5.0
Screencasts of a specific window now also include any popups that the target window creates. (David Redondo, link)
Changed the Bluetooth wizard to not show unnamed devices by default. This should make the list more actionable and faster to parse. (Sebastian Kügler, link)
When you mute the system, changing the volume in any way now un-mutes all playback devices, rather than only the active one. This prevents a situation where a non-default playback device remains muted and therefore plays no sound when you switch to it deliberately, or when the system switches to it automatically for some reason. (Oliver Beard, link)
The pop-up preview for a folder on the desktop that’s empty now displays a placeholder message so it’s more obvious what it is, and that it’s not just some weird broken UI element. (Nate Graham, link)
Did you know that KDE is working on our own virtual keyboard that we hope to eventually replace Maliit? Well, we are! The Plasma virtual keyboard got a lot of development attention recently, making it look better and fixing multiple usability issues. (Devin Lin, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5)
The Plasma keyboard isn’t quite ready yet, but we’re pushing it forwards to help it reach that point hopefully soon!
Frameworks 6.16
Sorting by date in the open/save dialogs opened by Plasma or any KDE apps now shows the newest files first, rather than last. (Nate Graham, link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.3.6
Fixed an issue that could cause screen flicker when playing full-screen games after switching focus away from them. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Plasma 6.4.2
Fixed a bug that could cause KWin to crash if you removed some of the keyboard shortcuts for the Task Switcher and then invoked it with any of the remaining shortcuts (for example Alt+Tab). (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed a regression that prevented the Global Menu widget’s “Single button” mode from working. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Reverted a change made to the Powerdevil power management system that prevented it from running for users whose uid values are extremely low or extremely high. (Bhushan Shah, link)
Fixed a regression that caused the screens on certain TVs to go black when turning on HDR mode but not using the TV’s “Game mode” setting. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed a regression that caused some of KWin’s color-related functionality (HDR, ICC profiles, etc.) to not work properly on screens that actually send correct EDID information indicating they are in sRGB mode by default. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed a regression that caused the animated previews for windows on other virtual desktops and shown in the desktop strip of KWin’s Overview effect to be frozen rather than continuing to update live. (David Redondo and Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed a weird bug that could cause the popup of a standalone Audio Volume widget (not in the System Tray) to change its size after the screen it’s displayed on turns off and back on again. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Fixed a similar weird bug that could, under certain circumstances, cause your Plasma panels to disappear after the screen they’re displayed on turns off and back on again. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Plasma 6.4.3
Fixed an issue that could cause the built-in RDP server to crash when closing invalid connections. (Harald Sitter, link)
Fixed multiple related issues that could cause certain screens to turn on again after being turned off, or vice versa. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed an issue that caused windows created by their app in a very very special way to fail to open. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed two issues with Orca screen reader integration: one that caused “Learn mode” to not work properly, and another caused the use of “Flat review modifier keys” to unexpectedly insert text in any views that allow text insertion which happened to be focused. (Nicolas Fella, link 1 and link 2)
Plasma 6.5.0
Pressing the Esc key while on the Peers Properties dialog for a Wireguard VPN no longer breaks it. (Ivan Tkachenko, link)
Frameworks 6.16
Fixed two cases case where Kirigami-based apps (including Plasma apps like System Settings and Discover) could crash: one when you scroll with a mouse wheel while animations are globally disabled, and another one when software rendering is in use. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link 1 and link 2)
Other bug information of note:
- 2 very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
- 29 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 28 last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.5.0
Updated the Plasma widget template so that it’s compatible with Plasma 6 and shows modern best practices for widget development. (Tobias Fella, link)
Frameworks 6.16
Improved the system’s ability to detect which GPU is the more powerful one for the purposes of the “Run this program using the more powerful GPU” feature. (Jan Drögehoff, 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! A monetary contribution of any size 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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