This Week in Plasma: Plasma 6.5 is here!
And by all accounts, it’s pretty good! So far Plasma 6.5 has been a rather smooth release, with the only significant regression I’ve seen so far being a compatibility issue with older AMD GPUs that turned the cursor into Swiss cheese. It’s already fixed, to be released with Plasma 6.5.1. We’re also following up on an intentional change to the blur effect that unintentionally made it uglier in some cases.
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And we can dance and chew bubblegum too, so many eyes turned towards UI improvents and new features again! So this week there’s a good balance to report, methinks. Have a look:
Notable New Features
Plasma 6.6.0
You can now configure the Task Manager to adjust the volume of audio played by a task by scrolling over it. (David Redondo, link)
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.5.1
You can now drag items out of the Kickoff Application Launcher’s Favorites grid without accidentally re-ordering them; when the dragged item leaves the grid area, everything resets to how it was before you started dragging it, leaving you with only the dragged item. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Job progress notifications will no longer prompt you to see more details when there’s only one item, because in this case, there are no more details. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Job progress notifications minimized to the history view are now always shown there, rather than only the three latest ones being shown. (Kai Uwe Broulik, Link)
Plasma 6.6.0
Adjacent category highlights in the Kickoff Application Launcher widgets no longer touch. (Nate Graham, link)
When playing media in a web browser and controlling it via the Media Player widget through functionality provided by Plasma Browser Integration, the website’s favicon is now shown as the album art if it doesn’t provide any actual album art of its own. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
On System Settings’ Display Configuration page, all the sliders now have the same width. (Vsevolod Stopchanskyi, link)
You can now find the “About this System” page by searching for “winver”, which may be familiar to Windows refugees. (Michał Kula, link)
Frameworks 6.20
The Breeze “Open link” icon now has a reversed version for right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew, and it’s now used in various places. (Farid Abdelnour and Nate Graham, link)
Switched to a fancier page push/pop animation. (Marco Martin, link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.4.6
Fixed a case where KWin could get stuck after you opened an excessive number of windows on a very small screen. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed a case where KWin could crash when hot-plugging screens. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed a bug making it impossible to map stylus input to a different screen with some drawing tablets. (Roman Kolbaskin, link)
Fixed a bug that made simulated input (e.g. when using software like Deskflow) not work as expected when any screens were mirroring other ones. (Brett Girton, link)
Plasma 6.5.1
Fixed two recent regressions that could make KWin crash. (Xaver Hugl and David Redondo, link 1 and link 2)
Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when hot-plugging screens. (Someone going by “Tabby Kitten”, link)
Fixed a recent regression that broke the appearance of mouse pointers for people using certain older AMD GPUs. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed an issue in Spectacle that broke some of its “Export” functionality. (Noah Davis, link)
Fixed a bug that prevented KDE’s geo:// URL handler apps from being visible in the portal-based “Open With…” dialog. (Ilya Fedin, link)
The option to have wallpapers switch between their light or dark mode based on color now accurately reflects that it looks at the lightness or darkness of the Plasma style’s colors, not the apps’ colors. (Nate Graham, link)
Properly rounded the corners of GTK 3 apps’ menus, so there’s no little square bit hanging out. (Rocket Aaron, link)
Fixed an issue that made an extra line of pixels appear below the titlebars of windows being recorded using the “window screencast” feature in Spectacle and other apps. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed a keyboard focus bug that made the down arrow key in the Kicker Application Menu widget get handled incorrectly after searching for stuff. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Plasma 6.6.0
Fixed an issue that made RDP connections look washed out and gray when using clients with certain ffmpeg versions. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
Fixed the “Show Apps As” setting in the Application Dashboard widget. (Tomislav Pap, link)
Frameworks 6.20
Fixed a weird issue that could make certain System Settings pages lag or freeze when using the system in Chinese. (Marco Martin, link)
Fixed an issue that made app lists pages in Discover horizontally scrollable with the arrow keys even when everything actually fit just fine. (Marco Martin, link)
Qt 6.11
Fixed a bug causing sub-menus that needed to open to the left of their parent menus to instead overlap them. (David Edmundson, link)
Other bug information of note:
- 0 very high priority Plasma bugs! (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 30 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.5.1
Switched to using a lower-bandwidth method of transmitting color information, which reduces overhead for screens just barely within the available bandwidth of the cable/port/GPU they’re plugged into, and makes them less likely to fail to display any image at all. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed an issue that prevented direct scanout from being used when it should have been. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Plasma 6.6.0
Added support for apps to pass the position property when they initiate screen sharing, allowing them more control on multi-screen setups. (Nicolò Monaldini, link)
Ported the clock widgets to a new "libclock" library, which should fix various edge case bugs, in addition to the architectural and maintenance benefits of the new library. (David Edmundson, link)
How You Can Help
Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. We’re over the 60% mark, but we won’t reach the finish line without your help!
If money is tight, 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.
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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