This Week in Plasma: more app permission configuration; pre-Akademy edition!
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week, KDE contributors from around the world are traveling to Akademy, KDE’s annual conference. I myself am on a train right now as I write these words (though hopefully not still there when you read them), on my way to meet with fellow KDE people for a week of working, planning, and social bond strengthening! Expect a light report next Saturday, or none at all.
Nevertheless, this week, folks managed to be productive anyway. We’ve got a new feature, some UI improvements, bug fixes, efficiency Improvements… the works!
Notable New Features
Plasma 6.5.0
The “Flatpak Permissions” page in System Settings has grown into a more general “Application Permissions” page by additonally letting you configure settings related to the XDG portal system, such as taking screenshots, accepting remote control requests, and more! (David Redondo, link)
Implemented support for the XDG Wallpaper portal, which allows portal-using apps to requests to change the desktop and lock screen wallpaper. (David Redondo, link)
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.5.0
The focus stealing prevention settings on System Settings’ Window Behavior page now do sensible things on Wayland. At one end, “Extreme” requires a valid activation token for every focus request. On the other end, “None” ignores them completely, allowing every activated window to immediately take focus. The default setting is “Low”, which should result in fewer failed activations now, while still not letting apps go nuts and steal focus all the time. (Xaver Hugl, link 1 and link 2)
System Settings’ Day/Night Cycle page (which is where the Night Light timing settings moved to) now lets you enter times in AM/PM style, if that’s what the rest of your system shows and uses. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
You’re no longer required to manually create a remote desktop account for remote-desktop purposes; now your existing user account works as expected, and you can just supply its credentials to the client app. (David Edmundson, link)
Discover is now more verbose about what it’s doing while fetching updates, so it doesn’t seem stuck and you can tell which source is being slow and gumming up the works. (Aleix Pol Gonzelez, link)
Improved keyboard navigation in the Kicker Application Menu widget when no apps are marked as favorites. (Christoph Wolk, link)
The monospace font you choose on System Settings’ Fonts page is now synced to GTK apps. (Reilly Brogan, link)
System Settings’ Tablet page now warns you if you try to use it to configure a tablet that’s being managed by a custom user-space tablet driver, because these can conflict and produce odd results. (Joshua Goins, link)
Frameworks 6.18
Improved the visuals of how toolbars load themselves in various Kirigami-using apps and System Settings pages. (Marco Martin, link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.4.5
Improved the reliability with which screen settings are chosen and restored. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Plasma 6.5.0
The Night Light feature no longer somewhat distorts the colors in screenshots and screen recordings. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed an issue in KWin that caused dragging-and-dropping items in Firefox’s bookmarks sub-menus to not work properly. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1 and link 2)
Fixed an issue in KWin’s Zoom effect that caused the cursor to use the wrong shape when it passed over a zoomed-in area of an XWayland-using app that would normally use a different cursor shape. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Frameworks 6.18
Fixed a case where various Kirigami-using apps and System Settings pages could crash under certain circumstances. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Fixed an issue in draggable list items throughout Kirigami-using apps and System Settings pages that prevented them from being dragged upwards in a way that would require scrolling the view. (M. Sadık Uğursoy, link)
Fixed an issue that prevented the “File already exists!” dialog from appearing when you try to rename a file on the desktop to have the same name as another file there. (Pan Zhang, link)
Other bug information of note:
- 4 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 26 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.5.0
Added support for “Underlays”, which promise to improve efficiency in GPUs that support it. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Made KWin’s blur effect per-view, which looks better when screencasting. (Xaver Hugl, 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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