This Week in Plasma: UI and Performance Improvements

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week was heavy on improvements for both the user interface and also performance, helping Plasma 6.8 to shape up quite nicely:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

When using the system in a language other than English, you can now search for and find System Settings pages using keywords in English as well as the current language. (Sergey Katunin, systemsettings MR #418)

You can now disable entries on System Settings’ Autostart page without having to fully delete them. (Ramil Nurmanov, plasma-workspace MR #6951)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8

You can now select on the lock screen which authentication type you want to use when multiple types are available, and each one gets a nicer UI. This is an experimental change that just landed, and there’s no GUI yet to set up all the authentication types. We’re working on documenting it, for a start! (Harald Sitter, plasma-desktop MR #3689, plasma-workspace MR #6542, and kscreenlocker MR #318)

You can no longer set the resolution to a value so low that you’ll probably break your system and be unable to recover without the intervention of an expert. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9765)

Improved the alignment of the buttons on the lock screen, which is especially visible in some languages. (Ramil Nurmanov, plasma-dsktop MR #3951)

New

Old

Discover now remembers which reviews you’ve rated as useful or useless and doesn’t let you submit new ratings for them later, because the reviews server doesn’t support this, and it would emit an ugly error code in response to you trying. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #521866)

Auto-hide panels now hide themselves only 50 milliseconds after the pointer leaves them — reduced from the previous value of 500 milliseconds. This makes them feel much more responsive. (Seb Jo, plasma-workspace MR #6885)

The automatic brightness feature now adjusts in a smarter way to any manual brightness changes you make, so the system does a better job of learning your screen brightness preferences in various lighting conditions over time. (Matt Whitlock, kwin MR #9237)

When an Audio Volume widget is placed on a panel in standalone form, its popup now starts out large enough to accommodate everything in it without scrolling. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #522654)

New

Old

Improved the way error messages from the audio subsystem are communicated to the user while using the microphone tester feature. (Nate Graham, plasma-pa MR #419)

Implemented highlighting for non-default settings on System Settings’ Remote Desktop page. (Tobias Ozór, krdp MR #232)

Cursor feedback effects now dodge screen edges, so they are always fully visible. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bugzilla #498068)

KWin’s notifications about GPU resets now trigger for all GPUs, not just the primary one. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9768)

Improved the Breeze styling for GTK 4 apps’ menus and window borders. (Rocket Aaron, breeze-gtk MR #104)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Fixed multiple issues relating to Discover failing to terminate all of its processes after quitting, which would lead to it being unable to launch properly later. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, discover MR #1393)

Fixed multiple issues relating to System Settings not switching its sub-category sidebar view when expected during various less-common modes of interaction. (Mradul Pal, systemsettings MR #415)

The Digital Clock widget’s tooltip no longer lets really long text overflow; instead it expands to make room. (Luis Bocanegra, plasma-workspace MR #6950)

The Weather Widget no longer shows info buttons for alerts that do nothing when clicked; now they only appear if they’ll do something. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #519676)

Plasma 6.7.5

Fixed multiple cases where the “KDE daemon” background process could crash while reading to or writing from the system’s password storage system when network conditions changed in various ways. (Mickaël Thomas, plasma-nm MR #624)

Fixed an issue where Task Manager window thumbnails could sometimes go missing. (Vlad Zahorodnii, plasma-desktop MR #3959)

The Calendar widget no longer oddly changes the date it’s showing when dragged from one screen to another. (Antti Savolainen, KDE Bugzilla #472360)

Plasma 6.8

Screen readers can now read all of the UI elements on the Activities sidebar. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #519306)

Using the clipboard’s “Keep the selection and clipboard the same” setting no longer breaks the ability to copy multi-cell data between sheets of a spreadsheet in LibreOffice Calc. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #505209)

When a remote desktop connection is unexpectedly severed, the System Tray icon notifying you about it now disappears as expected, instead of sticking around until the system is restarted. (Nick Haghiri, krdp MR #234)

Fixed two issues where the Audio Volume widget would show the wrong panel icon under some unusual conditions. (Seth Morris, plasma-pa MR #422)

Frameworks 6.30

The “Do you really want to permanently delete this item?” dialog for items on the desktop no longer percent-encodes special characters in file names, because it looked ugly. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #522470)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8

Discover’s background notifier process now uses much less memory when it checks for updates. (Méven Car, KDE Bugzilla #509180)

Improved Plasma’s startup speed a bit by doing less unnecessary work when loading wallpapers. (Nicolas Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6898)

Further improved the speed and efficiency of KWin’s “take a screenshot” functionality. (Zhora Zmeykin, kwin MR #9756)

Improved the smoothness of screen recordings made on high-refresh-rate screens. (Fililip, KDE Bugzilla #524129)

The microphone tester feature now records audio at the system’s current sample rate rather than forcing a 44.1kHz sample rate, which could have ramifications elsewhere on the system if you’re doing audio production. (Dan Fi, KDE Bugzilla #523693)

Frameworks 6.30

Improved the way SVG images are cached, which slightly increases speed and reduces video memory usage. (Méven Car, ksvg MR #115)

How you can help

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Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team!

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You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keeps KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

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Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

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