This Week in Plasma: a lot of polishing!

Saturday, 16 August 2025 | Nate Graham

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 didn’t focus on features, and instead fixed bugs, improved performance, and improved the UI. There were several concerted pushes on various initiatives that bore a lot of fruit! Relatedly, if you notice that the number of high-priority bugs has risen, this is the result of recent bug triaging to prioritize those issues for fixing soon.

But don’t worry, there’s still a lot of feature work happening in the background, it’s just that none of it landed this week. Ultimately it’s good that we take our time here, as half-baked new features have been a source of bugs in the past. We want to make sure we’re merging work in a state that minimizes the chance of regressions.

So check it out:

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.5.0

The Ocean sound theme’s volume change feedback sound has been reduced in loudness so it doesn’t sound so harsh anymore, and doesn’t clip at high volumes. (Harald Sitter, link)

Plasma now shows a system notification by default when you plug in a device. This was done primarily for accessibility reasons, but can also help with troubleshooting. Note that we also did some work to make these notifications not annoying, so you’ll be less tempted to post negative comments on Phoronix before using it. And you can also turn the notifications off if you want, and go back to just sounds! Or no feedback at all, if you prefer that. (Nate Graham and Kai Uwe Broulik, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Notification about a Logitech USB optical mouse having been connected

The Adwaita GTK theme is now shown by its correct name on System Settings’ Application style page, rather than appearing as “Default”. (Luan Oliveira, link)

Made a bunch of accessibility improvements to System Settings’ Flatpak Permissions page. (Christoph Wolk, link)

On Plasma widgets’ “About” pages, website information is now shown in a more appropriate place, rather than with the license information. (Nate Graham, link)

Plasma widget “About” page with the website listed in its own section

Frameworks 6.18

All tasks that register with Plasma’s job tracker now automatically inhibit sleep and screen locking; this is now opt-out rather than opt-in. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

We’ve removed all of the colorful 3rd-party app icons from the Breeze icon theme. This was a complicated decision, but ultimately we reasoned that overriding 3rd-party app developers’ branding was rude, and we also realized that even if we didn’t care about that, we lacked the interest and resources to maintain the icons as those developers changed their apps’ branding over time. Anyone who feels sad about this is welcome to create an icon theme containing only the old colorful 3rd-party app icons which inherits Breeze, and stick it up on https://store.kde.org for others to use. (Nate Graham, link)

The “New Folder” Dialog invokable from Plasma and many KDE apps now word-wraps long paths, so the dialog can’t become comically wide. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

KDE Gear 25.12.0

Konsole and Kate are now capable of passing Wayland activation tokens back and forth, so running kate [path to file] in Konsole now causes existing Kate windows to get raised. For now it’s just those two apps; a more generic solution for arbitrary combinations of apps still needs to be implemented. (Christoph Cullmann, link 1 and link 2)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.4.5

Fixed an issue that could cause the ksgrd_network_helper process to stick around longer than needed, doing unnecessary work and potentially delaying system shutdown. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Fixed an issue that would, over time, generate multiple duplicate entries for Plasma widgets on System Settings’ Shortcuts page. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Prevented Spectacle’s menus from appearing in its screenshots on X11 as well. We originally fixed this for Plasma’s Wayland session, but have now backported the fix for the X11 session as well. (Ismael Asensio, link)

The plasma-apply-desktoptheme command-line tool works again. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Fixed the selection highlights in System Settings’ Region & Language page so that text has the right color when its list item is clicked or selected, no matter what color scheme you’re using. (Han Young, link)

Correct selection highlight for list items on the Region & Language page

Fixed an issue that could cause DDC/CI control of screen brightness to re-activate itself after a screen dims on idle, in the case where you deliberately turned it off and want it to stay off. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed an issue that caused NVIDIA GPUs to display the wrong names on Info Center’s “About This System” page. (Oleg Gorobets, link)

Fixed a weird issue in the Kicker Application Menu that prevented search results from appearing if you removed all the favorite apps. (Christoph Wolk, link)

The “Open in File Manager” button for camera devices that appear in the Disks & Devices popup now actually takes you to the location with all the pictures. (Bogdan Onofriichuk, link)