This Week in Plasma: Printer Ink Level Monitoring
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 UI and feature work for Plasma 6.5 continued to progress, along with a bunch of nice technical changes and bug fixes. Have a look:
Notable New Features
Plasma 6.5.0
For supported printers, plasma now tells you when the printer is low on ink! (Mike Noe, link)
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.4.4
Notifications marked as “low priority” or that you’ve manually configured to now show up in the history now selectively ignore that, and do show up in the history when they arrived during Do Not Disturb mode. The reason for this is that otherwise these notifications would simply vanish, and you’d never get a chance to see them at all. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
The hitboxes for items on the desktop now match the visual styling; no more clicking in an empty-looking place and getting a file or folder selected despite no hover effect! (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Plasma 6.5.0
Key repeat has been disabled for a number of global shortcuts that could trigger rapid full-screen flashing if you held down the shortcut, because this risks causing seizures in photosensitive people. Affected actions include toggling Overview, full screen mode, maximize/de-maximize, and inverting the screen colors. (Ritchie Frodomar, link 1, link 2, and link 3)
The “Someone started sharing this screen” notification now appears only after the connection has been fully established and screen sharing has actually begun, rather than at the moment when the connection was initiated. (David Edmundson, link)
The “Confirm deleting network connection” dialog now uses standard KDE styling. (Renner 03, link)
The spacing between menu items in the Global Menu widget is now more consistent with menus in individual windows. (Rebecca Bee, link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Soon
Plasma Browser Integration’s browser plugin no longer breaks random features or various known video conferencing websites when its enhanced media controls setting is active. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Plasma 6.4.4
Fixed a bug that caused KWin to crash on the next login when you enable the magnifier effect but don’t use it to zoom in at all before logging out. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed a bug that caused KWin to crash on login when run in a QEMU virtual machine using the Bochs video driver. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed the Global Menu widget’s single-button mode for X11 users too. (Kishore Gopalakrishnan, link)
The search field in the Wayland version of the Global Menu widget once again works. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Fixed a bug in the KDE’s implementation of the Global Shortcuts XDG portal that confused apps into thinking they had no shortcuts after you accepted the dialog to make some changes. (David Redondo, link)
Fixed a bug causing notifications in the history view to not appear in sequential order. In case you remember this previously being advertised as fixed, it was, because we worked around a Qt bug that was causing the issue. Well, that Qt bug got fixed, causing our workaround to re-introduce the bug! Software development is hard. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Plasma Browser Integration’s built-in Share feature once again works. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Plasma 6.5.0
Cross-app window activation/raising now works more reliably in a couple cases, and also now works for files opened from KRunner-powered searches except for the Recent Documents runner, which is also being worked on. (Kai Uwe Broulik and Xaver Hugl, link 1, link 2, and link 3)
Fixed a bug that prevented the virtual keyboard from being able to enter text into the Application Dashboard widget’s search field. (Arnav Rawat, link)
Fixed a layout bug that caused the contents of the “Set up a printer connection” page to visually overflow when opened from the “New printer detected” notification. (Mike Noe, link)
When accessed from Plasma (not System Settings), wallpaper grid items now follow the Plasma color scheme, rather than the app color scheme. This is relevant when using a mixed light/dark Global Theme like Breeze Twilight. (David Redondo, link)
Frameworks 6.17
KRunner-powered search results once again take into account frequency of use. (Nate Graham, link)
Other bug information of note:
- 4 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 28 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 32 last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.4.4
Fixed a source of inotify leaks caused by reconfiguring the Plasma Desktop or the Folder View widget to show a different folder. (Harald Sitter, link)
Plasma 6.5.0
Implemented support the the pointer_warp_v1 (“Pointer Warp”) Wayland protocol that allows apps to ask the compositor to move the pointer. (Xaver Hugl, link)
XDG portal-using apps can now explicitly request a screencast or remote desktop session of a new virtual output. (David Redondo, link 1 and link 2)
Added some more autotests for basic Plasma widget loading functionality. (Nicolas Fella, link)
The clipboard configuration window’s size and position are now stored in the state config file, not the settings config file. (Nicolas Fella, 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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