This Week in Plasma: 6.5 beta and start of the bug-fix-a-palooza
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week we finalized the set of features and major changes in Plasma 6.5, and released the first beta. I’d encourage everyone to test it out! One of the best ways these days is via KDE Linux. Many other distros also offer “unstable” KDE repos and the like. Please do test. For the next month, the Plasma team will be focusing on bug-fixing, so let us know what the bugs are!
This week, the last few features landed, and we began The Great Plasma 6.5 Bug-Fix-a-Palooza:
Notable New Features
Plasma 6.5.0
Implemented support for text insertion point tracking in the Zoom effect on Wayland. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
You can now set up a VPN with the “Fortigate” vendor. (Roland Tapken, link)
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.5.0
KRunner is now smarter about performing mathematical calculations when given numbers with group separators. (Han Young, link)
Implemented more improvements to make Wayland window activation/raising work better. (Xaver Hugl, link)
You can now right-click the list items of many System Tray widgets to access their extra actions without having to expand them first. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Improved the way Discover communicates the status of Flatpak installations and updates. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)
Improved the way screen readers describe actions and keyboard shortcuts on System Settings’ Shortcuts And Autostart pages. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2)
The Kicker Application Menu widget now shows a placeholder message when you search for something and get no results. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Removed the combined meta-transaction in Discover’s transactions view, because it wasn’t necessary, and confused people when there was only one transaction happening. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)
The desktop bar at the top of KWin’s Overview effect now fades in and out nicely. (Tony Wasserka, link)
Plasma Vaults now consistently uses the terms “lock” and “unlock” everywhere. (Nate Graham, link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.4.6
Fixed an issue that prevented the Breeze GTK style from being activated by default in Plasma, as intended. (Fabian Vogt, link)
Fixed some issues with printer ink levels being shown unnecessarily, or hidden when useful. (Mike Noe, link 1 and link 2)
Plasma 6.5.0
Fixed an issue that could cause Plasma to get stuck at high CPU usage when you invoked its scripting system in a very specific way. (Albert Astals Cid, link)
Fixed an issue that could cause input methods to stop working with X11 apps on Wayland. (Xuetian Weng, link)
Drag-and-drop now works with a stylus on Wayland. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed two issues that broke the ability to load certificates for 802.1X networks and view VPN server logs. (Ilia Kats, link 1 and link 2)
Fixed some issues in the DrKonqi bug reporting wizard that caused UI elements to overflow at small window sizes or with languages with long words like Russian and German. (Nate Graham, link)
Clicking on a disabled zoom button on the map present on the Night Color page in System Settings (which moves to the Day/Night Cycle page in Plasma 6.5) no longer inappropriately moves the current location marker to be under the button. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed an issue that caused some Flatpak apps to not display the right icons on System Settings’ Flatpak Application Permissions page. (David Redondo, link)
Fixed an issue that could cause blinking graphical artifacts at the edges of screens with floating panels when using certain fractional scale factors. (Xaver Hugl, link)
When connecting to a Plasma system using remote desktop, typing text now always inserts letters from the keys you typed, rather than respecting the keyboard layout on the remote machine, because that would potentially insert different letters from the ones you typed. (Nicolas Fella, link)
When configuring the System Monitor apps and widgets, the spinboxes that let you enter degrees are a lot less janky now. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
KRunner’s popup no longer overflows beyond the bottom edge of the screen when there are a ton of results — especially when it’s configured to appear in the center of the screen; now it scrolls as needed. (Oliver Geer, link)
Gear 25.12
Launching apps using Konsole no longer causes their CPU and memory usage in the System Monitor app and widgets to be attributed to Konsole. (Christoph Cullmann, link)
Frameworks 6.18
Fixed two somewhat common Plasma crashes caused by improper thread use the SVG rendering pipeline. (David Edmundson, link 1 and link 2)
Other bug information of note:
- 2 very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
- 27 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 26 last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.5.0
Created a little command-line kwindowprop tool that works in much the same way that the X11-specific xprop tool did: you run it, click on a window, and then it prints information about that window. (David Redondo, link)
The last-used virtual desktop and the size of portal-based open/save dialogs are now saved in their respective state configs, not their settings configs. (Nicolas Fella, link 1 and link 2)
The command-line kscreen-doctor tool now reports refresh rates correctly, with two digits of precision for decimal values. (Liu Jie, link)
Qt 6.10
Implemented support for notifications about “graphics resets”, which Plasma and other Qt-based apps (but not KWin, which already supports this) will be able to use to behave more sensibly when graphics cards don’t behave so sensibly. (David Edmundson and Vlad Zahorodnii, 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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