This Week in Plasma: UI Improvements Galore
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week we merged a number of features and UI changes that focus on user-friendliness — in addition to a nice crop of bug-fixes and performance improvements:
Notable new features
Plasma 6.8
If you try to print using a printer that’s unavailable, Plasma now helpfully notifies you of this instead of just doing nothing. (Mike Noe, KDE Bugzilla #362143)
Notable UI improvements
Plasma 6.8
Task Manager thumbnails now feature nicer padding around the labels near the top. (Michal Malinowski, plasma-desktop MR #3916)
When creating a new user account, the restrictions around which characters are allowed for the username of the new account are now clearly indicated via warning messages if you try to use invalid ones. (Mradul Pal, KDE Bugzilla #521545)
Kup 0.11.0
Kup now offers an improved set of default exclusions, with a simplified way of toggling them on or off. This should result in much less data being backed up that doesn’t actually need to be backed up — like cache files, state files, Btrfs snapshots, and more. (Bharadwaj Raju, kup MR #52)
Notable bug fixes
Plasma 6.6.7
If the xdg-desktop-portal-kde process crashes while it’s being used to allow an app to control the pointer and keyboard, control now instantly returns to you rather than getting stuck until the system is restarted. (Marcus Renheim, KDE Bugzilla #523515)
Using a panel’s “Floating Applets” feature no longer breaks the ability to drag files onto Task Manager representations of grouped tasks. (Antonio Rojas, KDE Bugzilla #510643)
The Task Manager widget no longer lays out items incorrectly when you rearrange them while the widget is using right-to-left mode. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #504898)
The “Identify Displays” feature no longer shows weird hexadecimal numbers in the labels for some screens. (David Wild and Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #523181 and kwin MR #9655)
Plasma 6.7.4
Fixed a UI glitch in the Disk Quota widget. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #523618)
Plasma 6.7.5
Syncing your settings to Plasma Login Manager now includes the ~/.config/plasma-localerc file, which makes the login screen respect your preferred language and time settings. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #516964)
Fixed or implemented support for the “highlight changed settings” feature for multiple System Settings pages. (Tobias Ozór, kwin MR #9675, KDE Bugzilla #521974, powerdevil MR #660, KDE Bugzilla #521978, and KDE Bugzilla #469914)
System Settings’ Spell Checking page no longer erroneously prompts you to save unsaved changes when you navigate away from it without having made any changes. (Antti Savolainen, KDE Bugzilla #521712)
The “OS Version” sensor in System Monitor widgets now works more reliably to handle KDE Linux and other non-traditional operating systems. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #523727)
Plasma 6.8
Fixed a bug in Plasma’s built-in remote desktop server that could present certain clients with a black screen instead of the expected content. (Shouvik Kar, krdp MR #222)
Switching between virtual desktops no longer makes the Window List Widget show the wrong window. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #523409)
The Applet::Index() property in Plasma scripting now actually returns the correct index. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #523675)
Notable in performance & technical
Plasma 6.8
Plasma’s built-in remote desktop server now exhibits less latency and better performance when using less-than-ideal network connections. (Shouvik Kar, krdp MR #190)
Plasma now loads the clipboard pop-up on demand rather than at launch, which saves some memory. (Nicolas Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6899)
How you can help
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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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