This Week in Plasma: OCR in Spectacle and many UI improvements
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week Spectacle gained OCR (optical character recognition) functionality, allowing you to turn words in images into selectable text!
(and yes, this is Spectacle recording itself performing OCR)
Right now the functionality is limited to Spectacle, but the code is in the process of being moved to a library so more apps can benefit, too. Thanks a lot to Jhair Paris, who implemented this feature that will appear in Plasma 6.6!
In addition, many UI improvements landed, as well as some high-priority bug fixes and performance improvements. A good week, I’d say! Have a look:
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.5.3
You can now drag a tab out of a Chromium/Chrome window and immediately tile it to a screen edge or corner. (David Redondo, link)
Implemented some improvements to the Breeze theming for GTK 4 apps, including making the rounded corners consistent and fixing invisible expander arrows for expandable group boxes. (Kevin Duan, link 1 and link 2)
Made the favorites column in the Kicker Application Menu widget compatible with more kinds of icons in non-default icon themes. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Plasma 6.6.0
Overhauled a bunch of the portal-based permission dialogs to just look way nicer in general. (Harald Sitter, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, link 9, link 10, link 11, link 12)
Renaming a file or folder on the desktop now lets it keep its existing position. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)
Plasma’s Timer widget now has a nicer and more straightforward configuration page, with two old pages merged into one new one. (Tobias Fella, link)
For similar reasons, the system Tray’s only two main configuration pages have also been merged into a single new one. (Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)
When an app asks to register keyboard shortcuts on launch and you don’t let it, this preference is now remembered, instead of the annoying app just asking again the next time it launches. (David Redondo, link)
The GTK theme chooser now lets you preview the dark version of the theme, too. (Luan Oliveira, link)
Frameworks 6.21
File transfer notifications now fall back to file-based progress display in situations when size-based progress display isn’t available. (Pan Zhang, link)
The Breeze icon theme now includes icons for Nim code files. (Sophie Ahumada, link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.4.6
Fixed a seemingly random Plasma crash. (David Redondo, link)
Plasma 6.5.3
Fixed a regression that made KRunner crash when searching on operating systems that use Musl as their C standard library instead of Glibc. (John Zimmermann, link)
Fixed a case where Discover could crash while updating software if Flatpak itself throws a malformed error. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)
Fixed a regression that broke Spectacle’s “exclude shadows” option. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed a regression that made desktop icons not get visually hovered when approaching them from the left side at certain speeds and locations. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)
Fixed an issue that made the context menu for apps or processes being monitored in System Monitor open in the wrong place when using certain multi-screen setups. (Oliver Schramm, link)
Worked around a Qt regression that broke hiding columns in System Monitor’s table views using the column header context menu. (Alexey Rochev, link)
Worked around a kernel bug that that made some systems fail to go to sleep the first time it was initiated. (Bhushan Shah, link)
Worked around some driver bugs that caused mangled cursor styling with certain GPUs. (Xaver Hugl, link 1 and link 2)
Other bug information of note:
- 4 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 31 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 35 last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.5.3
Fixed a case where KWin could get blocked due to heavy disk I/O operations. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
The clipboard portal now supports being used in remote desktop sessions and with middle-click primary selection. (David Redondo, link 1 and link 2)
Increased the level of visual fidelity when using a fractional scale factor. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Plasma 6.6.0
Increased the level of visual fidelity when using a fractional scale factor even more, this time when using software rendering. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
A process that’s crashing in a loop can no longer make the system run out of memory and freeze as a result of the crash tracer trying to debug all the crashes. (Harald Sitter, link)
How You Can Help
Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. Believe it or not, we’ve already hit out our €75k stretch goal! I’ve been informed that a second stretch goal is available now, too! I’m just in awe of the generosity of the KDE community and userbase. Thank you all for helping KDE to grow and prosper.
If money is tight, you can help KDE by directly getting involved. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. 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.
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.
Newsletter
Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.