This Week in Plasma: Saved clipboard items and tablet touch rings
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week saw huge improvements to the Plasma clipboard, KRunner, and drawing tablet support — not to mention a bunch of UI improvements in Discover, and plenty more, too! So without further ado…
Notable New Features
Plasma’s clipboard now lets you mark entries as favorites, and they’ll be permanently saved so you can always access them easily! This is very useful when you find yourself pasting the same common text snippets all the time. The feature request was 22 years old; this may be a new record for oldest request ever implemented in KDE! (Kendrick Ha, link)
Plasma now lets you configure touch rings on your drawing tablet! (Joshua Goins, link)
Discover now lets you install hardware drivers that are offered in your operating system’s package repos! (Evan Maddock, link)
KRunner and KRunner-powered searches can now find global shortcuts! (Fushan Wen, link)
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.5.0
KRunner and KRunner-powered searches now use fuzzy matching for applications. (Harald Sitter, link)
Improved the way Discover presents error messages to be a bit more user-friendly and compliant with KDE’s Human Interface Guidelines. (Oliver Beard and Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)
Discover now lets you write a review for apps that don’t have any reviews yet. (Nate Graham, link)
On operating systems using RPM-OSTree (like Fedora Kinoite), there’s no longer an awkward red icon used in the sidebar and other places you’d expect black or white icons. (Justin Zobel, link)
KDE Gear 25.12.0
Opening a disk in KDE Partition Manager from its entry in Plasma’s Disks & Devices widget no longer mounts the disk, which is annoying since you’ll then have to unmount it in the app before you can do anything with it. (Joshua Goins, link 1 and link 2)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.4.5
Fixed a critical issue that could cause the text of a sticky note on a panel to be permanently lost if that panel was cloned and then later deleted. This work also changes handling for deleted notes’ underlying data files: now they’re moved to the trash, rather than being deleted immediately. Should be a lot safer now! (Niccolò Venerandi, link 1 and link 2)
Fixed a very common KWin crash when changing display settings that was accidentally introduced recently. (David Edmundson, link)
Made a few strings in job progress notifications translatable. (Victor Ryzhykh, link)
Fixed an issue that could allow buttons with long text to overflow from System Monitor’s process killer dialog when the window was very very small. (Nate Graham, Link)
Fixed an issue in the time zone chooser map that would cause it to not zoom to the right location when changing the time zone using one of the comboboxes. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
The warnings shown by System Settings’ Fonts page in response to various conditions will now be shown when you adjust all the fonts at once, not only when you adjust one at a time. (Nate Graham, link)
Plasma 6.5.0
Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while you were configuring the weather widget. (Bogdan Onofriichuk, link)
Fixed an issue that could cause System Settings to crash while quitting when certain pages were open. (David Redondo, link)
Plasma is now better at remembering if you wanted Bluetooth on or off on login. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Panels in Auto-Hide, Dodge Windows, and Windows Go Below modes will now respect the opacity setting. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Frameworks 6.18
Fixed an issue that caused Plasma to crash when dragging files from Dolphin to the desktop or vice versa when the system was set up with certain types of mounts. (David Edmundson, link)
Other bug information of note:
- 4 very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 5 last week). Current list of bugs
- 26 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 27 last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.5.0
Implemented support for “overlay planes” on single-output setups, which have the potential to significantly reduce GPU and power usage for compatible apps displaying full-screen content. Note that NVIDIA GPUs are currently opted out because of unresolved driver issues. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Implemented support for drag-and-drop to and from popups created by Firefox extensions, and presumably other popups implemented with the same xdg_popup system, too. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed an issue that would cause V-Sync to be inappropriately disabled in certain games using the SDL library. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Undetermined release date
The annotating feature in Spectacle has been extracted into a re-usable library so that it can also be used in other apps in the future! Such integration is still in progress (as is working out a release schedule for the git repo that the library lives in now), but you’ll hear about it once it’s ready! (Noah Davis and Carl Schwan, 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, too.
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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