This Week in Plasma: Akademy Special
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week about 200 KDE contributors and enthusiasts attended Akademy, but somehow people still found the time to be productive! Plasma contributors released the second beta of Plasma 6.8 and landed a bunch of user interface improvements and bug fixes.
As always, this is only a curated subset of everything that happened in Plasma over the week.
Check it out:
Notable UI improvements
Plasma 6.8
Click feedback for System Tray icons now works a lot better (even if it remains inconsistent with other things, which is also being worked on!). (Kamil Wolter, KDE Bugzilla #520915)
The focused tab in a Plasma tab bar now looks less like a link, which it isn’t. (Christoph Wolk, libplasma MR #1584)
You can now use the “Switch to Last-Used Keyboard Layout” keyboard shortcut on the lock screen. (Pavel Lunin, kscreenlocker MR #373)
Password fields throughout Plasma now show an explanatory tooltip when you hover over the little eyeball icon that shows and hides the characters of the password. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #525790)
Muting an app or window from its Task Manager entry no longer closes the preview tooltip for it. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #521174)
Dragging the QR Code of an item in the Clipboard widget now shows it visually attached to the pointer during the drag. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7108)
Plasma 6.9
KRunner-powered searches are now more flexible about currency conversions: you can now put the currency symbol on either side of the number and it will still recognize it as something that can be converted. (Alex Čižinský, KDE Bugzilla #446045)
Copying text in Info Center now shows some visual feedback so you know it worked. (Mradul Pal, kinfocenter MR #313)
You can now search for a weather station whose name includes punctuation without including the punctuation in your search. For example, you can search for “st louis” to find weather stations for “St. Louis”. (Bohdan Onofriichuk, KDE Bugzilla #515637)
Notable bug fixes
Plasma 6.7.6
Fixed a bug that could make logout, shutdown, or restart fail if there was already another attempt to do so running in the background. (Gregor Papez, KDE Bugzilla #525911)
Fixed a bug in the Weather Report widget that could make it get stuck after canceling a search that returned any results from the BBC. (Bohdan Onofriichuk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1133)
Fixed a regression that made CPU Information get cut off in Info Center. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #523197)
Plasma 6.8
Plasma no longer crashes when you delete a starred clipboard entry from the Meta+V popup. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #526007)
Long labels can no longer overlap on System Settings’ Shortcuts page. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #525725)
Fixed a bug in the Weather Report widget that could mis-report the night temperature for weather stations from the wetter.com provider. (Bohdan Onofriichuk, KDE Bugzilla #520315)
Queries in KRunner-powered searches longer than 63 characters no longer spam the journal log with hundreds or thousands of pointless messages. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #525983)
The Dictionary widget’s minimum size no longer breaks its layout. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1138)
Notable in performance & technical
Plasma 6.8
Plasma’s Bluetooth setup wizard can now be used to find and pair Bluetooth Low Energy devices while something else on the system (such as KDE Connect) holds open a discovery session for other devices. (Robert August Vincent II, KDE Bugzilla #526178)
Plasma 6.9
The C.UTF-8 locale is now available on System Settings’ Region & Language page. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #438290)
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!
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 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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