This Week in Plasma: car of the year edition
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
Let’s thank Lubos Krystynek, Rafal Krawczyk, and John Veness for stepping up to help with this week’s issue. Thanks, guys!
This week, the first car running KWin won the “Car of the Year” award. Yes, really — KDE in the car! Here’s KDE’s Victoria Fischer talking about it at Qt World Summit 2023:
Almost all of these posts end with “KDE has become important in the world…” and I think this is a good reminder that it’s true, not just some empty platitude. KDE is important. And all of you building or using KDE’s software are important, too.
But KDE is not only important to cars; we’re incredibly important to computers! And on that subject, some really nice features and user interface improvements landed for the upcoming Plasma 6.6 release. The hard feature freeze is coming up soon, at which point we’ll move into full bug-fixing and polishing mode.
But until then, enjoy some juicy new goodies! Check it out:
Notable New Features
Plasma 6.6.0
You can now save your current visual settings as a new global theme! (Vlad Zahorodnii, plasma-desktop MR #6097)
Added a “Forget device” action to the Bluetooth system tray widget, allowing users to remove paired devices without opening System Settings. (Andrew Gigena, KDE Bug #434691)
You can now search for processes in System Monitor based on their full command-line invocation when the “Command” column is visible. (Alexey Rochev, KDE Bug #448331)
On supported systems, the logout screen now mentions when the system will restart into a different operating system or boot option after it reboots. (Nikolay Kochulin, plasma-workspace MR #5469)
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.6.0
The Power and Battery widget now tells you what specific power management actions apps are blocking, instead of assuming that they’re all blocking both sleep and screen locking. (Jakob Petsovits, KDE Bug #418433)
System Settings’ Thunderbolt page now hides itself when the device doesn’t support Thunderbolt. (Alexander Wilms, plasma-thunderbolt MR #47)
When there are many windows open, the Task Manager widget will now scroll to the active one when you open its window thumbnail list. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bug #499716)
Notifications no longer waste space showing the same icon in two places. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6151)
Spectacle now remembers the size (and on X11, also the position) of its main window across launches. (Aviral Singh, KDE Bug #499652)
Made multiple UI improvements to the “Configure Columns” dialog in System Monitor. (Arjen Hiemstra, plasma-systemmonitor MR #405)
In the Weather Report widget, when a weather station isn’t reporting the current wind speed, the widget now says it doesn’t know the wind speed, rather than claiming it’s “calm”. (Tobias Fella, kdeplasma-addons MR #969)
The Kickoff Application Menu widget now does a better job of handling a huge number of favorite apps. Now the favorites column eventually becomes scrollable, instead of letting icons overlap. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bug #424067)
You can now find System Settings’ Wallpaper page by searching for “desktop background” and some other related terms. (Shubham Arora, plasma-workspace MR #6152)
Frameworks 6.23
Made it possible to see more items at once in the “Get New [thing]” dialogs. (Nate Graham, frameworks-knewstuff MR #380)
Open/Save dialogs now use relative-style date formatting for recent dates and times, which matches how Dolphin shows them. (Méven Car, frameworks-kio MR #2103)
Folders that show thumbnails of their contents now refresh the thumbnail immediately when any of those files are removed. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bug #497259)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.5.5
Fixed a strange issue that broke key repeat only in the Brave web browser. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bug #513637)
Fixed an issue that could make the panel configuration dialog appear on the wrong screen with certain panel and screen arrangements. (Aleksey Rochev, plasma-workspace MR #6140)
Fixed two issues with the “Show Alternatives” popup: one that made it get cut off outside of the screen area for widgets positioned on certain areas of the desktop, and another that made it not disappear when it lost focus. (Aleksey Rochev, KDE Bug #511188 and KDE Bug #511187)
Plasma 6.6.0
Fixed an issue that made Plasma quit when you disconnected the last screen. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #513003)
Fixed an issue with the Applications table on System Monitor’s Overview page being blurry with certain scale factors. We had already previously fixed this, but it turned out there were more remaining cases where it still happened, so this should take care of the rest! (Arjen Hiemstra, KDE Bug #445759)
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.6.0
Implemented support in Plasma for the up-and-coming oo7 Secret Service provider. (Marco Martin and Harald Sitter, plasma-workspace MR #6109)
Fixed a hilarious issue that caused the wallpaper to bounce a tiny bit with certain fractional scale factors on secondary screens using direct scan-out while on a very recent kernel version. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #513277)
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 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.
For example, helping out to write these posts is warmly appreciated. Anyone interested in getting involved should check out the evolving documentation on the topic.
You can also help out by making a donation! This helps 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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