This Week in Plasma: day/night theme switching
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 something was merged for Plasma 6.5 that a lot of people have been wanting for a long time: automatic day/night theme switching! And that's not all; we’ve got more visual customizability on offer too, plus a bunch more UI improvements and bug fixes. Check it all out here:
Notable New Features
Plasma 6.5.0
You can now have Plasma automatically switch to a different Global Theme at night! (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
You can now choose which Global Themes are shown on System Settings’ Quick Settings page, and turn on automatic day/night switching from there, too! (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
You can now choose to always see the light or dark variants of wallpapers that include both. Now there should be enough options for anyone: you can set dynamic wallpaper coloration to be based on the color scheme, based on the time of day, always light, or always dark. (David Redondo, link)
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.4.4
If you’re a person who prefers to drag things to your panel itself rather than to a Task Manager widget, those panel icons are now removable via their context menus. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Plasma 6.5.0
On Wayland, files opened from KRunner in an already-running app now raise that app’s window as expected. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
On Wayland, the Orca screen reader now reads out changes to the Caps Lock state. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Moved System Settings’ Screen Edges pages into the Display & Monitor group, because it feels more natural to group it with screens than with the type of input device used to trigger its features. (Nate Graham, link)
If your system is set up for hibernation, you can now hibernate from the SDDM login screen. (Tobias Leupold, link)
Clicking “Connect” on a network in the Networks popup now closes any other open password fields for other networks, so there’s only one visible at a time. (Arnav Rawat, link)
Re-phrased the sorting/alignment options in Plasma’s desktop icon configuration window to make it clearer what they do. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.4.4
Fixed a bug that could cause Plasma to freeze when spammed with many notifications containing images. (Paul Geerken, link)
Fixed a bug that could cause Plasma to crash while loading stuff. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Fixed a bug in Plasma’s desktop that prevented dragging-and-dropping things inside folders while the desktop was scrollable. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)
Fixed a bug that caused panel editing via drag-and-drop to break in hilarious/awful ways when using a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Fixed several bugs in Plasma’s desktop that would cause icons to shift around on their own due to changing the screen arrangement or having certain combinations of panel and desktop file alignment settings. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)
Fixed a bug in Discover that caused it to get confused about which version of a Flatpak app was considered unstable or outdated when the system has multiple Flatpak remotes set up. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Fixed two bugs involving renaming desktop files: one that made it impossible to rename symlinks to desktop files installed at the system level or generally without write permission, and another one that made rename jobs sometimes just kind of fail. (Akseli Lahtinen, link 1 and link 2)
Fixed a bug that prevented Plasma widget configuration windows from restoring their saved sizes as expected. (David Redondo, link)
Fixed a bug that caused you to have to leave System Settings’ Colors page and then go back to it after creating a copy of a color scheme, because it didn’t show up immediately. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)
Plasma 6.5.0
Fixed two cases where Plasma could crash in Activities-related functionality. (Daniel Hast, link 1 and link 2)
Fixed a bug in the free space checker that would cause it to inappropriately try to mount unmounted network shares defined in /etc/fstab, which could lead to hangs when there was no network connectivity. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Fixed a bug in System Settings’ Region & Language page that caused a visual glitch when using the system with a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Nate Graham, link)
Frameworks 6.17
Fixed a regression that made it impossible to drag files from Plasma’s desktop on one screen to another one. The fix for this also fixed some bugs in Dolphin, too. (Akseli Lahtinen, link 1 and link 2)
Qt 6.8.4
Fixed a Qt bug that caused KWin on X11 to sometimes consume excessive CPU resources when locking or turning off the screen. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Other bug information of note:
- 4 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 23 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 28 last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.5.0
Fixed a bug that could cause the plasmawindowed developer tool to crash when viewing the System Tray widget. (Chris Xiong, 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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