This Week in Plasma: lots of cool stuff
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week saw quite a lot of feature work and user interface polish for Plasma 6.6! Have a look:
Notable New Features
Plasma 6.6.0
There are now global actions for seeking forwards or backwards 5 or 30 seconds in the currently playing media. These work as long as the current media player supports letting other apps control seeking via MPRIS. The actions don’t have keyboard shortcuts assigned by default, but you can set them yourself. (Christoph Wolk, link)
You can now configure the Window List widget to show its menu on hover, or to hide the icon and only show the name of the active window. (Shubham Arora, link 1 and link 2)
You can now configure the order of the icons shown in the Lock/Logout widget. (Shubham Arora, link)
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.6.0
Continued to polish up the XDG portal dialogs. This time the screen & window chooser dialog has been simplified and improved some more. (Harald Sitter, link)
Canceling a paste of some files onto Plasma’s desktop no longer produces a pointless error notification. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Added pin buttons to the Web Browser and Audio Volume widgets so that if you have either them in standalone form on a panel, you can keep their popups open while you’re still using them. (Alexander Lohnau and Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)
Improved the usability of searching using the Kickoff Application Launcher widget in several ways: now you can use the arrow keys to navigate from the search results view back to the search field, and new search results that come in late don’t cause the selection highlight to jump around. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2)
Improved the appearance and usability of the disks shown in Info Center’s S.M.A.R.T. Status page. (Joshua Goins, link)
Clearing the clipboard while it happens to be showing a QR code for one of the now-cleared items now dismisses the QR code, too. (Fushan Wen, link)
The Kicker Application Menu widget no longer very briefly flashes a message saying “No matches found” right after you search for things. (Christoph Wolk, link)
Improved the experience of rapidly moving the pointer over top-level menu items in the Kicker Application widget; now the sub-menus appear in the same way they do for other menus in apps. (Christoph Wolk, link)
When using the Kicker Application Menu widget on a right screen-edge panel, sub-sub-menus now open to the left of their parent, rather than on the right where they cover up the main menu. This also now works properly with an RTL language and a left screen-edge panel. (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2)
Frameworks 6.21, with the full effect arriving in Plasma 6.6.0
The headers of Kirigami-based apps are now the same height as those of QtWidgets-based apps. In the process of improving this, we also managed to equalize the padding on all four sides of highlighted list items, and make them consistent with the outer padding of header items, too. (Marco Martin, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, and link 7)
The Fifteen Puzzle widget now has a nice new icon, and also uses a symbolic icon when placed on a panel. (Martin Sh, link 1 and link 2)
Frameworks 6.21
Reverted a change made a few months ago that hid .desktop files with NoDisplay=false set on them from apps’ “Open with” menus. While the original change seemed technically correct, it had negative side effects outweighing its advantages. (Nate Graham, link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.5.4
Fixed a random Plasma crash. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Fixed a case where turning on automatic updates in Discover would just make Discover crash in the background rather than running the updates. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)
Fixed an issue that broke pasting images from the clipboard into Dolphin. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed a case where drawing using certain oddly-behaving drawing tablets would draw outside of the screen area. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed a case where re-mapping drawing tablet stylus buttons didn‘t work. (Joshua Goins, link)
Plasma 6.6.0
Fixed an issue that mangled the desktop icon arrangement when dragging something to the desktop while it was using one of the automatic sorting modes. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)
Fixed an issue that made certain GPUs get displayed as “llvmpipe” in Info Center. (Oleg Gorobets and Harald Sitter, link 1 and link 2)
Fixed some issues that made Plasma’s desktop sometimes fail to notice newly-created, -deleted, or -changed files. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)
Fixed an issue that prevented re-opening the virtual keyboard immediately after closing it, but before clicking or re-focusing anything else. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Frameworks 6.21
Fixed an issue that mangled the display of devices whose names contain Unicode characters in USB plug/unplug notifications. (Nicolas Fella, link)
When you drag and drop an item from a Dolphin window that’s accessing a network location that requires Kerberos authentication, dropping it on the desktop now successfully downloads the file. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Other bug information of note:
- 5 very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
- 36 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 31 last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.6.0
Implemented support for XRandr emulation in KWin, which allows it to behave sensibly when running XWayland-using apps that make use of X11 APIs to change the screen resolution in a way that requires letterboxing or pillarboxing. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Improved the performance of the rectangular box you can drag on the desktop to select items. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)
Implemented support for the standard “reduced motion” setting that lets apps know that you’d like animations minimized. Now it’s toggled on automatically when you disable animations in System Settings. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Plasma 6.5.4
Fixed a memory leak in Plasma. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
How You Can Help
Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. Believe it or not, we’re up to almost €90,000 raised in a month and a half. This money will help keep KDE strong and independent for years to come, and 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.
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