This Week in Plasma: 6.8 Beta Release!
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week we released a beta of Plasma 6.8, and it’s ready for testing. Before branching, the team landed a lot of great improvements to make sure it’s an awesome release. Check it out:
Notable new features
Plasma 6.8
The Kup backup system has moved to Plasma! That means it will get regular releases, and we’re encouraging OS developers to start including it. It really works very well for off-device backups.
Notable UI improvements
Plasma 6.6.7
Discover once again shows Snap versions of apps in the source selector menu rather than as separate apps. (Gabriel Kuznik, KDE Bugzilla #519204)
Plasma 6.8
The clipboard’s settings for how to handle copied image data and “MIME actions” are now a lot more comprehensible. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #348932, KDE Bugzilla #502274, and KDE Bugzilla #473882)
New
OldChanging the volume really quickly no longer causes irritating-sounding popping noises in the volume level preview sounds. (Jeremy Senkiw, plasma-pa MR #424)
On the lock and login screens, clicking the “Show On-Screen Keyboard” button (renamed from “Virtual Keyboard”) now always shows the keyboard as you would expect, irrespective of its typical visibility settings. (Kristen McWilliam and Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #467209 and plasma-workspace MR #7044)
The Input Method widget has been somewhat similarly overhauled. Now it’s primarily used to switch between on-screen keyboard visibility modes, but also lets you manually show the keyboard while an XWayland-using app is focused, because these apps don’t have support for making the keyboard appear automatically. (Kristen McWilliam, plasma-workspace MR #6876)
The Kickoff Application Launcher widget is now always big enough by default to fully accommodate all items in its sidebar, rather than sometimes being scrollable — occasionally by even just a few pixels, which was fairly silly. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #515175)
Notifications’ speed graphs now have better axis label padding. (Méven Car, plasma-workspace issue #151)
Spectacle no longer shows a weird and misleading message about successfully copying the image to the clipboard after you use the “Share…” feature to share the image elsewhere. (Tobias Fella, spectacle MR #586)
Improved the keyboard navigation behavior of the Digital Clock widget’s calendar view. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-workspace MR #6900)
On System Settings’ Quick Settings page, the list of frequently-used pages is never just empty; now it shows a default set until you’ve used the app enough so that it knows what pages you frequently use. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #522711)
Changed the percentages shown on the Power & Battery widget to use fixed-width “tabular numerals”, so other UI elements don’t slightly jump around as the numbers change when using some fonts. (Christoph Wolk, powerdevil MR #674)
If you have multiple panels with System Tray widgets on them, clicking the “Show Notifications” button on the “You missed some notifications” notification now only opens the notification history widget on the first/main panel. (Ameen Al-Asady, plasma-workspace MR #7028)
In the Clipboard widget’s history view, the inline buttons for the selected item now only appear when it’s hovered or when any of the buttons have keyboard focus. This makes it possible to make the buttons disappear so you can read all of the selected item’s text. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #520130)
Reduced a bit of awkwardness in the way you rename audio devices. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #508211)
Notable bug fixes
Plasma 6.6.7
Fixed a really weird bug in the Kickoff Application Launcher that could make phantom representations of apps in one category appear in other categories after you scrolled around there for a bit and then switched to the other category. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #515229)
Plasma 6.7.6
Fixed a weird bug that prevented moving focus from the password field of a network shown in the Networks widget back up to the widget’s search field. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #525321)
Plasma 6.8
Plasma no longer crashes if you query the wallpaper using D-Bus while the wallpaper settings dialog was open, and then switching wallpaper plugins. (Alperen Yildiz, KDE Bugzilla #525207)
Copying text in LibreOffice apps now adds it to the persistent history every single time, rather than only every other time. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #519510)
Middle-click-pasting text that was selected in a non-Qt-based app into a Qt-based app now works every time, rather than every other time. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #506325)
Fixed an issue that could make some tool settings in Spectacle’s full-screen annotation UI appear off-screen. (Mirko Laruina, KDE Bugzilla #524499)
Fixed an issue that could leave the wallpaper previews in the Activity Switcher sidebar all black, instead of showing the wallpaper. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #378693)
An invalid XWayland configuration file inside /etc/xdg/Xwayland-session.d/ no longer prevents KWin from launching XWayland at all. (Ilya Katsnelson, kwin MR #9894)
Entering and exiting full-screen mode no longer makes Task Manager tasks’ “I’m playing audio right now” indicators disappear or get stuck in a partially transparent state. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #522471)
Frameworks 6.31
Fixed a bug that made the “Frames and Outlines Contrast” theme setting not take effect in certain apps where it was expected to work. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #525364)
Manually setting your home folder to “Indexed” on System Settings’s Search page no longer creates an un-removable clone of that entry. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #487212)
Qt 6.11.1
Fixed a serious QML issue that could make QML-based UIs break with nonsensical property errors. (Fabian Kosmale, Qt bug #149607 and Qt bug #146886)
Notable in performance & technical
Plasma 6.8
KWin has gained support for the commit_timing Wayland protocol. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #513283)
Remote desktop connections now benefit from even lower latency. (David Edmundson, krdp MR #237)
Gear 26.12
System Settings’ KDE Wallet page has been ported to QML. (Nicolas Fella, kwalletmanager MR #78)
How you can help
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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.
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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