This Week in Plasma: Finalizing 6.6
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week we put the finishing touches on Plasma 6.6! It’s due to be released in just a few days and it’s a great release with tons of impactful features, UI improvements, and bug fixes. I hope everyone loves it!
Meanwhile, check out what folks were up to this week:
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.7.0
Moved System Settings’ “Remote Desktop” page to the “Security & Privacy” group in System Settings. (Nate Graham, krdp MR #139)
Improved the way loop devices are handled in the Disks & Devices widget. (Bogdan Onofriichuk, plasma-workspace MR #6260)
Reduced visual jagginess in the split image effect of wallpaper previews that show both a light and dark version. (Fushan Wen, plasma-workspace MR #6283)
The Kicker Application Menu widget now supports using a non-square icon for its panel button, just like Kickoff does. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #3522)
Added a dedicated global action for un-tiling a quick-tiled window. It doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut by default, but you can assign one yourself. (Kevin Azzam, KDE Bugzilla #500636)
Videos in SDDM login screen themes can now be previewed in System Settings. (Blue Terracotta, sddm-kcm MR #99)
Improved the appearance of various dialogs created by KWin. Read more here! (Kai Uwe Broulik, kwin MR #8702)
You can now configure how long it takes the window switcher to appear after you start holding down Alt+Tab. (Guilherme Soares, KDE Bugzilla #486389)
Frameworks 6.24
In Kirigami-based apps, hovering the pointer over buttons that can be triggered with keyboard shortcuts now shows the shortcuts. (Joshua Goins, kirigami MR #2040)
Gear 26.04.0
Setting up a Samba share for one of your folders so people can connect to it over the network now turns on the Samba service (on systemd-based distros) if needed. This completes the project to make Samba sharing relatively painless! (Thomas Duckworth, KDE Bugzilla #466787)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.5.6
Monitor names shown in the Brightness & Color widget now update as expected if you connect or disconnect them while the system is asleep. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #495223)
Fixed multiple issues that caused custom-tiled windows on screens that you disconnect to move to the wrong places on any of the remaining screens. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #7999)
Plasma 6.6.0
Hardened KWin a bit against crashing when the graphics driver resets unexpectedly. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #8769)
Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when used with the i3 tiling window manager. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #511428)
Fixed a potential “division by 0” issue in system monitoring widgets and apps that messed up the display percentage of Swap sensors on systems with no swap space. (Kartikeya Tyagi, libksysguard MR #462)
Worked around a Wayland bug (yes, an actual Wayland bug — as in, a bug in one of its protocol definitions!) related to input method key repeat. Why work around the bug instead of fixing it? Because it’s already fixed in a newer version of the protocol, but KWin needs to handle apps that use the old version, too. (Xuetian Weng, kwin MR #8700)
Unified the appearance of HDR content in full-screen windows and windowed windows. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #513895)
Fixed a layout glitch in the System Tray caused by widgets that include line breaks (i.e. \n characters) in their names. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #515699)
The Web Browser widget no longer incorrectly claims that every page you visit tried to open a pop-up window. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1003)
Fixed a layout glitch in the Quick Launch widget’s popup. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1004)
You can now launch an app in your launcher widget’s favorites list right after overriding its .desktop file; no restart of plasmashell is required anymore. (Alexey Rochev, KDE Bugzilla #512332)
Fixed an issue that made inactive windows dragged from their titlebars get raised even when explicitly configured not to raise in this case. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #508151)
Plasma 6.6.1
When a battery-powered device is at a critically low power level, putting it to sleep and charging it to a normal level no longer makes it incorrectly run the “oh no, I’m critically low” action immediately after it wakes up. (Michael Spears, powerdevil MR #607)
The overall app ratings shown in Discover now match a simple average of the individual ratings. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #513139)
Searching for Activities using KRunner and KRunner-powered searches now works again. (Simone Checchia, KDE Bugzilla #513761
Frameworks 6.24
Worked around a Qt bug that caused extremely strange cache-related issues throughout Plasma and Kirigami-based apps that would randomly break certain components. (Tobias Fella, kirigami MR #2039)
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.6.0
Added support for setting custom modes for virtual screens. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #8766)
Added GPU temperature monitoring support for additional GPUs. (Barry Strong, ksystemstats MR #123)
Plasma 6.7.0
Scrolling in scrollable views spawned by KWin (not Plasma, just KWin itself) no longer goes 8 times slower than it ought to. Thankfully there are very few such views, so almost nobody noticed the issue. However fixing it facilitates adding a “scroll to switch virtual desktops” feature to the Overview effect for Plasma 6.7! (Kai Uwe Broulik, kwin MR #8800)
Frameworks
Moving a file to the trash is now up to 50 times faster and more efficient. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kio MR #2147)
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 bug fix mentioned here
Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.
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