This Week in Plasma: getting 6.6 ready for release
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week we reached that part of every Plasma release cycle where the bug fixes and polish for the upcoming release are still coming in hot and heavy, but people have also started to land their changes for the next release. So there’s a bit of both here!
Everyone’s working really hard to make Plasma 6.6 a high-quality release. It’s a great time to help out in one way or another, be it testing the 6.6 beta release and reporting bugs, or triaging those bugs as they come in, or fixing them!
Notable New Features
Plasma 6.7.0
The Emoji Selector window now lets you choose mixed skin tone groupings of emojis using a nice little user-friendly pop-up dialog. (Tobias Ozór, plasma-desktop MR #3426)
You’re now able to set a global keyboard shortcut to clear the notification history. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #408995)
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.6.0
In the Application Dashboard widget, keyboard focus no longer gets stolen by selectable items that happen to be right under the pointer at the moment the widget is opened. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #510777)
Breeze-themed checkboxes now always have an opaque background, which resolves an issue where their unchecked versions could be hard to see when overlaid on top of images. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #511751)
Plasma 6.7.0
System Settings’ subcategory back button is now more of a traditional back button, eliminating a source of redundant page titles. There are still too many, but this reduces the count by one! (Nate Graham, systemsettings MR #390)
On System Settings’ Notifications page, you can now always preview a notification sound even if sound is currently disabled for that notification. (Thomas Moerschell, plasma-workspace MR #6214)
Plasma’s network settings now expose additional L2TP VPN options that were previously unavailable. (Mickaël Thomas, plasma-nm MR #480)
The old Air Plasma style (the light counterpart to the Oxygen style) is back, with fixes and improvements, too! (Filip Fila, oxygen MR #77)
The Oxygen cursor theme received a small visual fix to improve the appearance of the busy cursor. (Filip Fila, oxygen MR #89)
The cursor theme settings now show more accurate previews, which fixes issues like wobbling cursors, and makes the preview grid feel more stable. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6240)
System Settings’ various theme chooser pages are now consistent about whether you can delete the active theme (no), and also let you know why certain themes can’t be deleted: because they were installed by the OS, not the “get new stuff” system. (Sam Crawford, plasma-workspace MR #6222)
The Weather Report widget now shows a progress indicator while its popup is open but still loading the weather forecast from the server. (Bogdan Onofriichuk, kdeplasma-addons MR #993)
Frameworks 6.23
Combobox pop-ups through QtQuick-based apps and System Settings pages now use the standard menu styling, rather than a custom style. (Nate Graham, qqc2-desktop-style MR #497)
Added styling for the new upstream SearchField component that was recently added to QtQuick itself. Now it looks like the KDE version that we created years ago before the Qt version existed. (Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano, qqc2-desktop-style MR #500)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.5.6
Fixed an issue on operating systems with asserts turned on (like KDE neon) that could sometimes crash Plasma when you launched apps. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #513312)
Plasma 6.6.0
Fixed a rare issue that could leave KWin without control of the mouse and keyboard at login. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #511611)
Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when moving around a Weather Report widget on the desktop. (Bogdan Onofriichuk, KDE Bugzilla #514200)
Fixed an issue in Discover when launched with Snap support that could prevent it being launched again after previously being closed. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Bugzilla #507217)
Fixed a case where the Plasma Bluetooth pairing wizard would fail to pair devices. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #495615)
The logout screen no longer fails to take focus if you raised the focus stealing level to “Medium” or higher, and manually de-focusing it no longer breaks your ability to re-focus it. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #514204 and Aleksey Rochev, KDE Bugzilla #511258)
The custom size ruler for Plasma panels no longer sometimes appears on the wrong screen of a multi-screen setup. (Vlad Zahorodnii, plasma-workspace MR #6215)
The “X notifications were received while Do Not Disturb was active” notification is no longer inappropriately saved to the notification history. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6223)
Fixed two semi-related issues with widgets that made them not let you pick the same color after deleting it, or configure the same mouse action after deleting it. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #514983 and KDE Bugzilla #449389)
The global menu on a newly-cloned panel on a different screen now realizes immediately that it’s on a new screen. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #514907)
Discover’s notification about ongoing updates no longer displays a nonsensically large number of updates under certain circumstances. (Harald Sitter, KDE Bugzilla #513676)
Plasma Browser Integration no longer exports Microsoft Teams calls as controllable media sources; it always omitted them in the past, but Microsoft changed the URL again, so we had to adapt to that once more. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #514870)
You can now move focus from the Application Dashboard widget’s search field using arrow keys, and also type accented characters using dead keys or the compose key as the first character in a search while the search field isn’t explicitly focused. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #511146 and KDE Bugzilla #510871)
Animated wallpapers explicitly set for the lock screen now play their animation as expected. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #460910)
Undoing the deletion of a panel widget no longer sometimes positions it far from where it was before. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #515107)
Ending the renaming of an item on the desktop by clicking on another item no longer starts a drag-selection for no good reason. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #514954)
The “Defaults” button on System Settings’ Accessibility page now works properly to reset non-default colorblindness modes. (Andrew Gigena, KDE Bugzilla #513489)
Plasma 6.7.0
Fixed a very nasty KWin bug that could, under certain rare circumstances relating to intensive Alt+Tab usage, cause the screen to go black. This change may be backported to Plasma 6.6 if it’s deemed safe enough. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #514828)
Frameworks 6.23
Fixed being unable to paste clipboard entries as text that were copied from a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet cell and then re-arranged in the clipboard history list. (Alexey Rochev, KDE Bugzilla #513701)
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.6.0
KRDP (the KDE library for remote desktop support) no longer requires systemd. (David Edmundson, krdp MR #141)
Plasma 6.7.0
KWin now supports the ext-background-effect-v1 Wayland protocol. This adds support for standardized background effects like blur, opening the door for visual consistency across apps using these effects. (Xaver Hugl, KWin MR #4890)
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.
Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team!
Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. 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.
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
Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.
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