This Week in Plasma: quick toggles in System Settings
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 some cool features and UI improvements landed. We’re in the middle of the Plasma 6.5 development cycle, so now’s the time to get your features merged, folks!
Notable New Features
Plasma 6.5.0
Pages in System Settings have gained the ability to communicate with the parent app a little bit. Now they can mark themselves as “not relevant”, for example when you don’t have the necessary hardware to use them. They can also export actions that will appear in the sidebar, allowing quick toggles for things like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. This has already been implemented for Bluetooth, and expect pages to start adopting these features soon where it makes sense! (Kai Uwe Broulik, link 1, link 2, and link 3)
Discover has gained support for flatpak+https:// URLs, which allows the Install buttons on Flathub to automatically open Discover. (Timothée Ravier)
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.5.0
Muting microphones with a dedicated "Mute Microphone" button/shortcut or else using the very cool secret Meta+Mute Microphone shortcut now mutes all microphones, rather than just the active one. This matches the behavior of muting speakers and other sound output devices. (Arnav Rawat, link)
Made a whole bunch of improvements to the cross-app window raising system throughout Plasma. You can read more about it in Kai Uwe’s blog post on the topic. (Kai Uwe Broulik and Xaver Hugl, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7)
The Plasma Browser Integration plugin for Firefox now blocks the system from going to sleep while a file is downloading, since Firefox doesn’t provide this feature itself. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Detected wireless networks are now shown on the relevant System Settings page, not just the System Tray applet anymore. You can connect to them there, too. (Arnav Rawat, link)
Almost all KRunner plugins now start to provide results after the first character typed. (Nate Graham, link)
Shortcuts for moving a window directly to another virtual desktop are now shown in the window titlebar context menu for that window. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
It’s now easier to see which screens are replicas of which other ones, because their serial numbers and connector names are now shown visibly. (Evgeniy Harchenko, link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.4.4
System Settings’ Tablet page is now scrollable so you can see everything if you have a fancy pen with a lot of features. (Joshua Goins, link)
Fixed a visual glitch affecting Kicker Application Menu widget’ search field. (Christopher Wolk, link)
Plasma 6.4.5
Fixed the top crash in Plasma right now that could sometimes cause it to crash when you opened the Notifications history with any notifications in it. We thought we had fixed this before, but it came back, and now we have a better fix. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
Fixed a really bad bug that would cause the .desktop file for a Flatpak app installed in your home folder to get moved when you dragged it from the Kickoff Application Launcher or Task Manager to somewhere else. (Marco Martin, link)
Fixed another bug related to dragging Flatpak apps to the desktop; now selecting “Copy” no longer produces a broken copy of the app’s .desktop file. (Marco Martin, link)
Fixed some more bugs that could cause desktop icons to shift around especially with multiple screens, and also for newly created files close to a vertical panel to be mis-positioned. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)
Task Manager theme previews now use the correct color scheme. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Frameworks 6.18
Fixed a bug that caused System Monitor Sensor widgets to be sized incorrectly on fit-content panels and make them resize themselves. (Leia Uwu, 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 (same as last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.5.0
Made Discover’s firmware updating (“Fwupd”) backend much faster, after it was discovered to be a bottleneck in launching Discover. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)
Frameworks 6.18
You can now use the dumb Copilot key on the keyboards of many modern laptops as the trigger for launching apps or any other action in places where you can set up keyboard shortcuts. We don’t yet have a way for you to re-bind it to emulate another key (like the Ctrl key you probably wanted all along), but hopefully that will eventually happen as well. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Improved the speed of thumbnail generation throughout KDE apps and Plasma. (Akseli Lahtinen, link 1 and link 2)
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.
Newsletter
Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.