Nate Graham on KDE Blogs

This Week in Plasma: UI and Stability Improvements

Nate Graham — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This was a somewhat quiet week mostly full of UI and stability improvements, perhaps because many KDE contributors are gearing up for next week’s mega-sprint in Graz! For the same reason, expect next week’s post to be short or non-existent.

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7

Breeze-themed menu items throughout KDE’s software ecosystem now visually change when clicked. (Akseli Lahtinen, breeze MR #605)

A variety of tooltips throughout Plasma now follow the styling of the active Plasma theme as expected. (Nicolas Fella, libplasma MR #1435)

Improved the Mouse Mark effect’s support for touchscreens: now you can draw multiple lines at a time if you have a multi-touch-capable screen. (Tin Dao, kwin MR #8951)

Synchronizing settings to the Plasma Login Manager now includes the current set of keyboard layouts. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bugzilla #516778)

Simplified the UI for the Clipboard widget’s QR code page: now the copy button is in the header, rather than all alone on its own row. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6451)

After

Before

Removed the feature to force the Task Manager and System Tray widgets to use a large spacing and icon size while in touch/tablet mode; it just didn’t work out, and caused un-resolvable sizing bugs. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #511439)

Improved the accuracy of widget positioning on the desktop: dragging a widget somewhere it won’t fit will now show its preview rectangle in the nearest place where it will fit, which is where it will end up. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6452)

Discover now uses consistent terminology when it asks you to restart. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #517630)

Frameworks 6.25

Trying to paste when your clipboard is empty now fails silently rather than showing a notification about it. (Tobias Fella, kio MR #2168)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.4

Hardened Plasma against crashing while trying to load a broken widget. (Harald Sitter, libplasma MR #1456)

Fixed a case where the KDED background daemon could die with a Wayland protocol error when changing the screen resolution. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #516217)

Fixed a bizarre issue that mangled certain text formatted with Markdown styling while Plasma’s on-screen keyboard was enabled but not visible. (Devin Lin, KDE Bugzilla #516511)

Fixed a case where System Settings’ Plasma Style page could crash on certain distros shipping Qt 6.11 with asserts turned on. (Ismael Asensio, plasma-workspace MR #6458)

Fixed usage graphs for certain NVIDIA GPUs being broken in the System Monitor app and widgets. (Bernhard Friedreich, libksysguard MR #465)

Popups for editing widgets while in Plasmas’s edit mode now work with a touchscreen. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #509880)

Hardened KWin against XWayland apps being sized incorrectly on systems with config files containing inappropriate scale values. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9049)

Rolled out a more complete fix for context menus of System Tray icons sometimes having ugly square black corners. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #513307)

Plasma 6.7

Made two technical fixes to the process of configuring OpenConnect VPNs (Aviral Singh and Alexander Becker, KDE Bugzilla #385395 and KDE Bugzilla #518289)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.7

Implemented support for the xx-fractional-scale-v2 Wayland protocol, which improves visual fidelity by reducing gaps between adjacent items. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #9023)

Continued with the work to add Vulkan support. (Diego Gomez, kwin MR #9027)

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 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.

This Week in Plasma: Easier Microphone Sensitivity Adjustment

Nate Graham, and John Veness — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week saw a large variety of improvements in fields as diverse as better support for multi-screen and multi-GPU setups, support for new portals, performance improvements, UI improvements, crash fixes, and more! Lots to get excited about this week:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.7

Implemented a feature that lets you record yourself with your microphone and play it back, making it easy to tell when the recording level is too high or too low. Then you can adjust the level until it’s just right. (Ramil Nurmanov, KDE Bugzilla #435256)

Reworked how the notifications portal is implemented, which, among other things, allows configuring the notifications sent by Flatpak and other portal-using sandboxed apps in the same way that you can configure notifications for traditionally-packaged apps. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6312)

Frameworks 6.25

KRunner-powered searches can now convert to and from the “momme” unit, which measures weight for silk textiles. (Nate Graham, kunitconversion MR #82)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.6.4

The bouncy app launch feedback animation by the pointer now looks better when using a fractional scale factor. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #489403)

Sped up the process for selecting a weather station for the Weather Report widget using the keyboard. (Nate Graham, kdeplasma-addons MR #1016)

You can now drag recent items in launcher menus onto the desktop. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-workspace MR #6431)

The Networks widget now instantly reports the last-used network, rather than only after restarting Plasma. (Aviral Singh, KDE Bugzilla #512951

The Task Manager widget now instantly updates the icon of a pinned or running app whose icon you’ve changed, rather than only after restarting Plasma. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6443)

Plasma 6.7

The screen chooser UI (e.g. for screen sharing/casting) now features fancier visualizations for screens, showing their wallpapers in the background. (Harald Sitter, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #532 and plasma-workspace MR #6409)

The super-custom folder chooser dialog, seen throughout KDE software, has been removed; now choosing a folder uses the standard “Open” dialog, and it only shows folders. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #197938)

Locked Plasma Vaults now have their mountpoints made read-only and badged with a lock icon, so it’s clearer what they are, and you or your apps can’t accidentally save files in there, which would block mounting the vault. (Matthias Pleschinger plasma-vault MR #72)

You can now limit the Wi-Fi band for networks in infrastructure mode. (Piotr Balwierz, plasma-nm MR #536)

Frameworks 6.25

Various message dialogs throughout KDE software now wrap their text at around 70 characters instead of at a point based on the screen width. (Thomas Friedrichsmeier, kwidgetsaddons MR #339)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.4

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when connecting another screen. (Harald Sitter, KDE Bugzilla #477941)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when the underlying services for apps with System Tray icons went away. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #518128)

Fixed a case where Spectacle could crash under certain circumstances when using multiple screens. (Vlad Zahorodnii, layer-shell-qt MR #95)

Fixed an issue that could make OBS crash on quit under certain circumstances. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #517599)

The Digital Clock widget’s feature to copy the current date and time to the clipboard in various formats now uses the correct time from your local time zone, not the UTC time. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #517692)

Fixed some cases of missing transparency in certain apps’ System Tray icons. (Qiancheng Sun, plasma-workspace MR #6427)

Fixed an issue uncovered by the upgrade to Qt 6.11 that applied the wrong color to the window snapping overlay. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #518178)

Plasma 6.7

Fixed an issue that made the System Monitor app and widgets show the wrong names for CPU cores on systems where there’s more than one physical CPU. (Kevin Tipping, KDE Bugzilla #515435)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.6.4

Blur in Konsole now plays nicely with the Wobbly Windows effect. (Jérôme Lécuyer, KDE Bugzilla #474196)

Plasma 6.7

Screen recordings made using Spectacle and other KPipeWire-using software now use the correct render device with multi-GPU systems, so the resulting recordings are always correct and valid. (Marsh Land, KDE Bugzilla #518008)

Implemented a “multi-GPU swapchain” for KWin, which unlocks future performance gains with multi-GPU use cases and Vulkan support. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #8926)

Improved the System Monitor app and widgets’ ability to detect multiple GPUs. (Michael Bauer, ksystemstats MR #130 and #132)

Made the System Monitor app and widgets no longer ignore fully-encrypted disks and RAID elements for the purposes of gathering disk I/O statistics. (Christoph Cullmann, ksystemstats MR #86)

Improved performance for the Alt+Tab switcher while the “Highlight Window” effect is on (as it is by default) and there are a lot of minimized windows. (Sushi Trash, kwin MR #8997)

Wayland 1.48

After over 6 years in development, the Wayland session restore protocol is complete and merged! KWin already has a draft implementation, so we should start to see some serious movement on this long-standing topic soon. (Jonas Ådahl and many others, wayland-protocols MR #18)

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!

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.

This Week in Plasma: Time Zone Offsets and Type-Ahead on the Desktop

Nate Graham, and John Veness — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week several new features landed, in addition to a number of user interface improvements and some nice performance improvements and bug fixes. Check ‘em out:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.7

For each additional time zone you add to the Digital Clock widget, it now also shows how far forward or behind that time zone is compared to yours. (Nate Graham, plasma-workspace MR #6417)

After

Before

If you disable the feature to invoke KRunner by typing on the desktop, instead typing on the desktop invokes “type-ahead”, which allows selecting files by typing the first letter or two of their names. (Guillermo Steren, KDE Bugzilla #427961)

You can now reverse the ordering of items in the System Tray widget. (Nathaniel Krebs, KDE Bugzilla #517016)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7

Discover now sorts app lists by number of reviews by default, resulting in vastly more relevant results while browsing rather than searching. The old rating-based sorting method is still available, of course. (Nate Graham, discover MR #1274)

After

Before

Discover now filters out non-apps from its home page, preventing death spirals of negativity where people would leave 1-star reviews saying they were broken (not being launchable apps, the “Launch” button wouldn’t work), causing them to move up higher in the list. (Nate Graham, discover MR #1287)

System Settings and KWin now consistently use the word “pointer” to refer to the mouse/touchpad pointer. (Philipp Kiemle, plasma-workspace MR #6425 and kwin MR #8982)

Screen un-dimming is now faster than dimming, since un-dimming would mean you’re ready to use the system again. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kwin MR #8963)

The currently-active task in a grouped task tooltip now has bold text, to help you pick it out. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #516278)

Labels for Bluetooth devices in the System Tray widget have been re-arranged so that you can always see the battery level no matter how long the device name is. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #515090)

The Global Menu widget’s menu highlights are now rounded consistently with the highlights for other menus. (Akseli Lahtinen, libplasma MR #1459)

You can now set a modifier key all on its own to focus a Plasma panel. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #3547)

Plasma’s panel configuration window now only offers opacity settings if the active Plasma style supports it. (Filip Fila, KDE Bugzilla #516042)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.5.6

Fixed a bug that distorted the image on certain vertically-oriented monitors while displaying the Plasma Login Manager. (Anton Gobulev, KDE Bugzilla #517409)

Plasma 6.6.3

Fixed a case where KWin could crash after changing the Zoom effect’s settings in certain specific ways. (Ritchie Frodomar, KDE Bugzilla #517073)

Fixed two cases where KWin could crash when misconfigured or given broken content. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #517137 and KDE Bugzilla #517711)

Fixed a few cases where KDE’s printing management system could crash due to faulty information from printers about their ink levels. (Mike Noe, print-manager MR #311)

The tooltip for the Refresh button in Discover’s Updates section no longer says “F5 (QQuickShortcut(gobbledygook))”, fixing an unexpected side-effect of a recent KDE Frameworks update. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #516392)

Plasma 6.6.4

Fixed an issue that made the “bounce keys” accessibility feature break key repeat in the Brave browser. (Ritchie Frodomar, KDE Bugzilla #513268)

In the shortcut conflict dialog opened by System Settings’ Shortcuts page, the “Re-assign” action now works. (Dávid Bácskay-Nagy, KDE Bugzilla #471370)

Made the update count in Discover’s notifications more accurate. (Akseli Lahtinen, discover MR #1284)

Frameworks 6.25

Reverted an innocent-looking change that broke icons for some apps like OBS and Ungoogled Chromium due to an underlying deficiency in the Qt toolkit’s SVG renderer. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #516007)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.6.4

Reduced CPU and GPU load for full-screen windows (also known as “direct scan-out”) on screens without the pointer on them. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #516808)

Plasma 6.7

Added support for “3D LUTs” in KWin, which reduces resource usage on GPUs that support color pipelines in hardware. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #8475)

The Networks widget now only fetches network speed information while that information is visible. (Ser Freedman, plasma-nm MR #544)

Stopped creating unnecessary OpenGL contexts for apps that don’t use OpenGL, which reduces their memory usage by 10-15 MB or more per app and also speeds up launch times. (Vlad Zahorodnii, plasma-integration MR #209)

Qt 6.10.3

Fixed an issue that broke HDR support while using the Vulkan renderer on certain hardware. (Joshua Goins, Qt patch #711621)

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!

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.

This Week in Plasma: Press-and-Hold for Alternative Characters

Nate Graham, and John Veness — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week something very special landed for Plasma 6.7: the ability to type characters not on your physical keyboard by pressing-and-holding the keys that it does have:

The feature lives in the plasma-keyboard module, so you’ll need to have that installed and turned on in System Settings > Keyboard > Virtual Keyboard. After that, just press-and-hold keyboard keys!

Kristen McWilliam wrote this wonderful feature, and it’ll ship with Plasma 6.7. Kristen has written a whole blog post about it if you want to know more.

But that’s not all! We’ve got some more features, a lot of user interface polishing, and some bug-fixing and performance work. All in all, a good week!

Other notable new features

Plasma 6.7

You can now install custom sound themes from downloaded files. (Sam Crawford, plasma-workspace MR #6115)

The Global Menu widget now shows menus for the active window even if it’s on another screen. This is configurable and can be turned off if you preferred the old behavior. (Trevor Jex, KDE Bugzilla #420418)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.6.3

Did a round of polish on the “Add Widgets” sidebar to make sure the widget count numbers are always correct and the on-demand delete button disappears the moment it’s no longer useful. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6378)

The “Configure” button on an unconfigured desktop widget now always fits within it, even if it’s very, very small. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6374)

The Clipboard widget no longer shows you QR codes for non-text items, for which they didn’t actually work. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6392)

Browsing through categories in Discover now highlights the active one in the sidebar as expected. (Akseli Lahtinen, discover MR #1280)

Made Spectacle’s magnifier better at being pixel-aligned. (Noah Davis, KDE Bugzilla #517274)

Plasma 6.7

In System Tray’s Clipboard and Networks widgets, the normal back button now lets you go back a page, so sub-pages no longer have two back buttons. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6393, plasma-workspace MR #6391, and plasma-nm MR #542)

Plugging in a USB printer now shows only one notification about it, not two. (Mike Noe, print-manager #312)

The “Kate Sessions” KRunner plugin no longer advertises results if Kate isn’t installed or is installed as a Flatpak where its functionality doesn’t currently work — though that could change in the future. (Nicolas Fella, kdeplasma-addons MR #1018)

Quick tiling two adjacent windows now centers them in the available area excluding any panels, rather than squeezing the window closest to the panels. (Anthony Flammia, KDE Bugzilla #484975)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.3

Fixed an issue that could prevent the system stats collector from working properly on Raspberry Pi devices. (Ben Murdoch, ksystemstats MR #127)

Fixed a few sources of glitchy behavior when resizing widgets on the desktop. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6373)

Worked around a bug in Samsung LS24D60xU monitors (yes really, a bug in the monitors themselves) that made them turn on and off again in a loop. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #516605)

Fixed a stubborn issue causing the Arch/CachyOS updaters’ System Tray context menus to sometimes be mis-positioned. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #517093)

It’s now possible to change the keyboard shortcut used for KWin’s Mouse Mark effect. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #501537)

The reset button in System Settings’ SDDM configuration page now resets a few more things it had missed in the past. (Chandradeep Dey, sddm-kcm MR #103)

Plasma 6.7

Implemented a fix in Plasma code to prevent Electron apps’ System Tray icons from all following each others’ settings. This is an upstream bug in Electron which has been fixed, but most Electron apps haven’t yet been updated to include the fix, so for them, this new Plasma-side fix should also stop the issue from happening. (Nekto Oleg, plasma-workspace MR #6400)

wxWidgets 3.3.3

Fixed a bug in the wxWidgets library that broke certain copy-paste operations in wxWidgets apps, such as KiCad and Audacity. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #514317)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.6.3

Reduced CPU and GPU load for full-screen windows (also known as “direct scan-out”) for screens using more fractional scale factors. (Błażej Szczygieł, KDE Bugzilla #517264)

Plasma 6.7

Improved the robustness with which sandboxed apps can initiate screencasting and remote desktop requests. (Gabriel Maizo, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #526)

If you happen to have multiple GPUs and any of them don’t actually support OpenGL 3D acceleration, this no longer prevents the more capable ones from providing 3D acceleration. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #441409)

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!

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.

This Week in Plasma: Polish and Stability

Nate Graham, and John Veness — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This was another week of focusing on bug-fixing and UI polishing. Not massively flashy stuff, but critical for the long-term stability of the platform. Check out the work:

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.6.2

The arrows in Discover’s “See More” buttons are now in the right place and point in the right direction for both left-to-right and right-to-left languages. (Nate Graham, discover MR #1275)

Plasma 6.6.3

The Panel Spacer Widget no longer appears in the widgets sidebar, because it only makes sense to put on panels, and there’s already a dedicated button to do that. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6376)

Allowed some labels in the Task Manager widget’s tooltips to become multi-line instead of eliding. (Nate Graham, plasma-desktop MR #3598)

After

Before

Plasma 6.7

Trying to save a color scheme with the name of an existing system color scheme no longer shows an accusatory and unclear error message; now it tells you you’ll need to choose a different name, and then prompts you to do so. (Akseli Lahtinen, plasma-workspace MR #6316)

Enabled the “Global Shortcuts” KRunner plugin by default. (Nate Graham, plasma-desktop MR #3590)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.2

Fixed a bug that made KWin crash if you used the kscreen-doctor tool to create a custom modeline while already using a different custom modeline. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #516452)

Spectacle no longer crashes when you try to share a rectangular region screenshot using KDE Connect. (Noah Davis, KDE Bugzilla #516717)

Fixed various issues with Plasma’s remote desktop server when accessed from a client running Microsoft Windows. (Nicolas Blackburn, krdp MR #148, krdp MR #149, krdp MR #150, and krdp MR #151)

Fixed a regression that made bridged Ethernet networks show an inappropriate icon in the Networks widget. VLANs still show the wrong icon though; hopefully that’ll be fixed next week. Networking is complicated! (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #516712)

Plasma 6.6.2: correct

Plasma 6.6.0: incorrect and noticeable

Plasma 6.5 and earlier: also incorrect, but less noticeable

Fixed a bug that made day names in the Digital Clock widget’s tooltip not be capitalized with certain languages. (Alessio Bonfiglio, plasma-workspace MR#6289)

Plasma 6.6.3

Fixed a case where KWin could crash when using the kscreen-doctor tool to change the resolution of a virtual screen in certain ways. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #517198)

Fixed a bug that could make Plasma crash on login with certain multi-monitor setups. (Dobry Nikolov, KDE Bugzilla #516937)

Fixed a regression that prevented certain monitors from automatically dimming at the right times. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #516867)

Fixed a regression that made Spectacle sometimes crash when quitting, instead of quitting cleanly. (Noah Davis, KDE Bugzilla #517064)

Fixed a regression that could cause long-presses on desktop widgets to unexpectedly trigger interactive controls on them. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #517040)

Fixed two visual glitches affecting on/off switches in Plasma when using non-default Plasma styles. (Filip Fila, KDE Bugzilla #504116 and KDE Bugzilla #516542)

Plasma 6.7

Fixed a somewhat common way that Plasma would quit (not crash, actually quit) with a Wayland protocol error when certain monitors woke from sleep. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #507691)

Fixed a bug that made Plasma’s file transfer progress notifications claim that the total number of files was 0 in cases where the actual number was very very large. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace #6369)

Fixed a funny bug that made auto-hidden Plasma panels unexpectedly un-hide when the password dialog appeared while the “Dim Screen for Administrator Mode” effect was in use, which it is by default. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #516864)

Frameworks 6.23.1

Worked around a Qt bug that was causing Plasma to repeatedly crash on login for some people. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #514098)

Fixed a bug that caused KDE’s desktop portal implementation to crash when copying certain content in a remote desktop session. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #515465)

Fixed various inter-related issues with the app database that could make favorite apps disappear from launcher menus and the Task Manager widget under certain circumstances, including when using certain JetBrains apps in auto-start mode. (Harald Sitter, KDE Bugzilla #516426 and KDE Bugzilla #507838)

PulseAudioQt 1.8.0

Fixed a bug that could make Plasma crash when you tried to access certain audio devices’ profiles menus. (Harald Sitter, KDE Bugzilla #496067)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.6.2

Made the Global Menu widget more robust in the face of apps that lie about having any menus. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-workspace MR#6345)

Plasma 6.6.3

Made KWin’s screencasting feature more robust when using PipeWire 1.6.0 or newer, which imposes stricter requirements compared to earlier versions. (Conn O’Griofa, kwin MR #8939)

Plasma 6.7

Let the kscreen-doctor tool modify the value of screens’ AutoRotatePolicy key. (Xaver Hugl, libkscreen MR #291)

Made the kscreen-doctor tool capable of targeting the active screen, so you don’t need to look up its technical ID. Also made it possible to toggle HDR and wide color gamut support simultaneously. (Yossef Rostaqi, libkscreen MR #294)

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!

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.

This Week in Plasma: Vietnamese lunar calendar and rounder highlights

Nate Graham — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 02:12:43 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week, in addition to the typical post-Plasma-release bug-fix spree, folks started working on UI improvements and features. Two notable examples are highlighted in the title, and found below:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.7

Added the Vietnamese lunar calendar to the list of “alternate calendars” available in the Digital Clock widget. (Trần Nam Tuấn, kdeplasma-addons MR #1015)

Refreshed the OpenVPN settings UI to include loads of new settings offered by the underlying system. (David Edmundson, plasma-nm MR #517)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.6.1

Improved the appearance of the large digits in the clock on the login and lock screens. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #516314)

After

Before

Plasma 6.6.2

The “caret tracking” accessibility feature now respects whatever tracking mode you’ve set in the zoom effect, rather than always using “proportional”. (Ritchie Frodomar, KDE Bugzilla #516435)

Changing the “Show virtual [network] connections” setting no longer requires restarting Plasma or the computer to take effect. (Arjen Hiemstra, KDE Bugzilla #516091)

Deleting a widget with a pinned-open popup now closes the popup immediately, rather than after dismissing the “Undo deleting this widget?” notification. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #470812)

Plasma 6.7

Rolled out the beginnings of a new rounded style for selection highlights in Breeze-themed QtWidgets-based apps, like Dolphin, Okular, and KMail. This brings them the style we’ve been using for years for list highlights in QtQuick-based apps and menu items everywhere, and paves the way for all of them to be consistently styled from a central location by the upcoming Union styling system. (Akseli Lahtinen and Marco Martin, breeze MR #583)

After

Before

Marking an app as a favorite in the Kickoff application launcher widget now flashes the “Favorites” category, giving you a hint that it worked and where the new favorite can be found. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-desktop MR #3565)

On System Settings’ Network Connections page, merged the two “Wi-Fi” and “Wi-Fi Security” tabs into one. (Alexander Wilms, plasma-nm MR #491)

Added a button to System Settings’ Application Permissions page to revoke all screen-casting sessions immediately, so you don’t have to do it one-by-one when there are a lot of them. (Joaquim Monteiro, flatpak-kcm MR #169)

Improved the text and icon shown in notifications sent by Plasma. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6351 and plasma-workspace MR #6353)

After

Before

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.1

Fixed a recent regression that broke the “Open containing folder” button for slideshow wallpapers. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #515551)

Fixed a recent regression that made the search field in the System Tray widget’s config window lose focus after typing text into it. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #515863)

Fixed a recent regression that made all drawing tablet stylii claim to have 3 buttons in System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page, no matter how many buttons they actually had. (Kat Pavlu, KDE Bugzilla #516442)

Fixed a recent visual regression that made the dark blurry backgrounds of the logout screen and the Application Dashboard widget look too light. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #516266)

Fixed a recent visual regression that made the desktop’s selection rectangle only follow the system’s accent color when using the Breeze Plasma style. Now it once again respects the accent color with all Plasma styles. (Filip Fila, KDE Bugzilla #516498)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when dragging System Tray widgets between panels. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #508451)

Fixed a constellation of issues that made certain screens not light up again after waking from sleep. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #515550)

Setting up monitor dimming rules no longer sometimes re-orders the monitors when the system is woken from sleep. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #516611 and KDE Bugzilla #516454)

The Display Configuration widget’s “Show when relevant” setting now does something. (Albert Vaca Cintora, kscreen MR #465)

Digits in the Digital Clock widget are now localized as expected for writing systems that don’t use Latin digits. (Fushan Wen, KDE Bugzilla #485915)

Fixed an issue that could sometimes make the Bluetooth widget tell you the connection to a device failed when it actually succeeded. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #515189)

Plasma 6.6.2

Fixed a case where Discover could crash while installing updates. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, discover MR #1268)

Fixed two cases where System Settings’ Shortcuts page could crash while searching for certain text or editing custom global shortcuts. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #516488 and KDE Bugzilla #516607)

Clearing the clipboard contents now also clears passwords and other secrets marked with special “hide me from the history” metadata that were copied but not actually added to the history. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #516403)

Fixed an issue that made the desktop not notice when files were deleted using Dolphin. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #516559)

Fixed an issue with the Global Menu widget’s compact button form that made the menu not always appear on click. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #516207)

Frameworks 6.24

The System Tray icon for KDE’s Kleopatra cryptography app now re-colors itself properly when using a non-default color scheme. (Oleg Kosmakov, breeze-icons MR #529)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.6.2

Improved support for mice with high-resolution scroll wheels in the built-in remote desktop (RDP) server. (reali es, KDE Bugzilla #511029)

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.

Help is needed to build a team around putting together this report, and keep it weekly! It’s a lot of work, and it doesn’t happen by accident. If you’d like to help, introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team.

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.

This Week in Plasma: 6.6 is Here!

Nate Graham, and John Veness — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:03:55 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week we released Plasma 6.6! So far it’s getting great reviews, even on Phoronix. 😁

As usual, this week the major focus was on triaging bug reports from people upgrading to the new release, and then fixing them. There were a couple of minor regressions as a result of the extensive work done to modernize Plasma widgets’ UI and code for Plasma 6.6, and we’ve already got almost all of them fixed.

In addition to that, feature work and UI improvements roared into focus for Plasma 6.7! Lots of neat stuff this week. Check it all out:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.7.0

While in the Overview effect, you can now switch between virtual desktops by scrolling or pressing the Page Up/Page Down keys! (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #453109 and kwin MR #8829)

On Wayland, you can optionally synchronize the stylus pointer with the mouse/touchpad pointer if this fits your stylus usage better. (Joshua Goins, KDE Bugzilla #505663)

The old print queue dialog has been replaced with a full-featured print queue viewer app, allowing you to visualize multiple queues of multiple printers connected locally or over the network! It still offers a good and normal experience for the common case of having one printer, but now also includes loads of enterprisey features relevant to environments with many printers. (Mike Noe, print-manager MR #280)

You can now exclude windows from screen recording using permanent window rules! (Kai Uwe Broulik, kwin MR #8828)

Added a new --release-capture command-line option to Spectacle that allows invoking it with its “accept screenshot on click-and-release” setting using automation tools. (Arimil, spectacle MR #479)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.6.1

The Custom Tiling feature accessed with Meta+T no longer inappropriately respects key repeat, and therefore no longer becomes practically impossible to open with a very high key repeat rate. (Ritchie Frodomar, KDE Bugzilla #515940)

Close buttons on the default “Thumbnails” Alt+Tab task switcher are now more legible on top of the window thumbnails. (Nate Graham, kwin MR #8830)

After

Before

The Networks widget now shows a more appropriate icon in the panel or System Tray when you disable Wi-Fi. (Nate Graham, plasma-nm MR #526)

After

Before

Plasma 6.7.0

The System Monitor app and widgets now respect your chosen “binary unit” choice. This means for example if you’ve asked for file sizes to be expressed as “GB” (gigabyte, or one billion bytes) rather than “GiB” (gibibyte, or 2^30 bytes), the system monitoring tools now respect that. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #453854)

If the auto-generated scale factor for a screen is very close to 100%, 200%, or 300%, it now gets rounded to that value, prioritizing performance and visual fidelity. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kwin MR #8742)

The Color Picker widget now displays more sensible tooltip and placeholder text when it hasn’t been used yet. (Joshua Goins, kdeplasma-addons MR #1010)

After

Before

Various parts of Plasma now consistently use the term “UEFI Firmware Settings” to refer to UEFI-based setup tools. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6246 and plasma-desktop MR #3541)

The “Terminate this frozen window” dialog now shows a little spinner as it tries to terminate the window, so you don’t think it’s gotten stuck. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kwin MR #8818)

The Widget Explorer sidebar now appears on the screen with the pointer on it, rather than always appearing on the left-most screen. (Fushan Wen, plasma-workspace MR #6251)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.1

Fixed a case where KWin could crash during intensive input method usage. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #506916)

Fixed a case where KWin could crash when waking up the system while using the Input Leap or Deskflow input-sharing apps. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #515179)

Fixed a case where Discover could crash while trying to install updates. (Harald Sitter, KDE Bugzilla #515150)

Fixed a regression that broke drag-and-drop onto pinned Task Manager widget icons. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #516242)

Fixed a regression that made certain popups from third-party software appear in the wrong place on the screen. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #516185)

Fixed a minor visual regression in the Zoom effect on rotated screens. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #8817)

Fixed a layout regression that made the Task Manager widget’s tooltip close buttons get slightly cut off for multi-window apps while window thumbnails were manually disabled. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #516018)

Fixed a layout regression that slightly misaligned the search bar in the Kicker Application Menu widget. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #516196)

Fixed a layout regression that made some System Tray popups always show an unnecessary hamburger menu. (Arjen Hiemstra, KDE Bugzilla #516135)

Fixed a regression that made some GTK apps not notice system-wide changes to the color scheme and enter their dark mode. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #516303)

Fixed a button added to Plasma 6.6 not having translated text. (Albers Astals Cid, plasma-workspace MR #6305)

Fixed server-to-client clipboard syncing in Plasma’s remote desktop implementation. (realies, krdp MR #144)

The new Plasma Login Manager introduced in Plasma 6.6 no longer shows accounts on the system that a human can’t actually log into. (Matthew Snow, plasma-login-manager MR #109)

Fixed a layout issue that made a label in the panel configuration dialog disappear when using certain Plasma styles. (Filip Fila, KDE Bugzilla #515987)

Fixed a layout issue that made the notification dialog too tall for very short text-only notification messages. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6145)

Fixed an issue that set the screen brightness to too low a level on login in certain circumstances. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #504441)

Fixed a layout issue that made the song or artist names in the Media Player widget get cut off too early when the widget was placed in a panel in between two spacers. (Greeniac Green, KDE Bugzilla #501166)

Improved the Weather Report widget’s reliability with forecasts from the Environment Canada provider. (Eric Soltys, kdeplasma-addons MR #1008)

Made the progress indicator built into icons in the Task Manager widget move in the appropriate direction when using the system with a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bugzilla #516053)

Custom icons embedded in third-party widgets that appear in the Widget Explorer sidebar now also appear in those widgets’ “About this widget” pages. (Mark Capella, KDE Bugzilla #509896)

Plasma 6.7.0

Eliminated a source of visual glitchiness with certain fade transitions while using an ICC profile. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #515194)

Frameworks 6.24

Fixed a case where KDE’s desktop portal could crash when copying certain data over a remote desktop connection. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #515465)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.6.1

Improved animation performance throughout the system by leaning more heavily on the Wayland Presentation Time protocol. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #516240)

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!

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 bugfix mentioned here

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

This Week in Plasma: Finalizing 6.6

Nate Graham, and John Veness — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:03:47 +0000

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)

After

Before

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)

After

Before

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!

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.

This Week in Plasma: beefed-up Window List widget

Nate Graham, Rafal Krawczyk, and John Veness — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:03:57 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week the Plasma team continued polishing up Plasma 6.6 for release in a week and a half. With that being taken care of, a lot of fantastic contributions rolled in on other diverse subjects, adding cool features and improving user interfaces. Check ’em out here:

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.7.0

The Window List widget now supports sorting and shows section headers in its full view, making it easier to navigate windows by virtual desktops, activities, or alphabetically. (Shubham Arora, plasma-desktop MR #3434)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.6.0

System Settings’ Touchscreen Gestures page now hides itself when there are no touchscreens. This completes the project to hide all inapplicable hardware pages! (Alexander Wilms and Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #492718 and systemsettings MR #391)

After

Before

The “Enable Bluetooth” switch in the Bluetooth widget no longer randomly displays a blue outline on its handle even when not clearly focused. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #515243)

Plasma 6.7.0

Plasma’s window manager now remembers tiling padding per screen. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #488138)

The wallpaper selection dialog now starts in the location you navigated to the last time you used it. (Sangam Pratap Singh, KDE Bugzilla #389554)

Theme previews on System Settings’ cursor settings page now scale better when using massive cursor sizes. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6244)

After

Before

Update items on Discover’s updates page now have better layout and alignment. (Nate Graham, discover MR #1252)

Completed the project to make the delete buttons on System Settings’ theme chooser pages consistent. (Sam Crawford, plasma-desktop MR #3506, sddm-kcm MR #101, and plymouth-kcm MR #47)

The System Tray icon that Discover uses to represent an in-progress automatic update now looks a lot more like the other update icons, and a lot less like Nextcloud’s icon. (Kai Uwe Broulik, discover MR #1258 and breeze-icons MR #526)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.6

It’s no longer possible to accidentally close the “Keep display configuration?” confirmation dialog by panic-clicking, unintentionally keeping bad settings instead of reverting them. (Nate Graham, kscreen MR #460)

Fixed a regression in sRGB ICC profile parsing that reduced color accuracy. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #513691)

3rd-party wallpaper plugins that include translations now show that translated text as expected. (Luis Bocanegra, KDE Bugzilla #501400)

Plasma 6.6.0

Fixed multiple significant issues on the lock screen that could be encountered with fingerprint authentication enabled: one that could break fingerprint unlocking, and another that could leave you with an “Unlock” button that did nothing when clicked. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #506567 and KDE Bugzilla #484363)

Fixed a Plasma crash caused by applying a global theme that includes a malformed layout script. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #515385)

Panel tooltips no longer inappropriately respect certain window placement policies on Wayland. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #514820)

User-created global shortcuts are now always categorized as “Applications”, resolving an issue whereby apps added by choosing an executable using the file picker dialog would be inappropriately categorized as system services and couldn’t be edited or deleted. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #513565)

Fixed two issues with recent files and folders in the Kickoff application launcher: now it shows the correct file type icons for items, and no longer sometimes shows a weird duplicate “files” section. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #496179 and KDE Bugzilla #501903)

Spectacle now shows the correct resolution in its tooltip for rectangular region screenshots when using a fractional scale factor on a single screen. (Noah Davis, KDE Bugzilla #488034)

The “Open With” dialog now filters its view properly when opened from a Flatpak app. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #506513)

Keyboard focus no longer gets stuck in the Search widget after its search results appear. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #506505)

Frameworks 6.23

Fixed a complicated issue that could sometimes break automatic KWallet wallet unlocking on login. (Bosco Robinson, KDE Bugzilla #509680)

Fixed a visual regression with certain item lists that made the last one touch the bottom of its view or popup. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #513459)

Notable in Performance & Technical

Frameworks 6.23

Reduced KRunner’s maximum memory usage while file searching is enabled. (Stefan Brüns, KDE Bugzilla #505838)

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!

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 bugfix mentioned here

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

This Week in Plasma: getting 6.6 ready for release

Nate Graham, John Veness, and Rafal Krawczyk — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:03:55 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week we reached that part of every Plasma release cycle where the bug fixes and polish for the upcoming release are still coming in hot and heavy, but people have also started to land their changes for the next release. So there’s a bit of both here!

Everyone’s working really hard to make Plasma 6.6 a high-quality release. It’s a great time to help out in one way or another, be it testing the 6.6 beta release and reporting bugs, or triaging those bugs as they come in, or fixing them!

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.7.0

The Emoji Selector window now lets you choose mixed skin tone groupings of emojis using a nice little user-friendly pop-up dialog. (Tobias Ozór, plasma-desktop MR #3426)

After

Before

You’re now able to set a global keyboard shortcut to clear the notification history. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #408995)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.6.0

In the Application Dashboard widget, keyboard focus no longer gets stolen by selectable items that happen to be right under the pointer at the moment the widget is opened. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #510777)

Breeze-themed checkboxes now always have an opaque background, which resolves an issue where their unchecked versions could be hard to see when overlaid on top of images. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #511751)

Plasma 6.7.0

System Settings’ subcategory back button is now more of a traditional back button, eliminating a source of redundant page titles. There are still too many, but this reduces the count by one! (Nate Graham, systemsettings MR #390)

After

Before

On System Settings’ Notifications page, you can now always preview a notification sound even if sound is currently disabled for that notification. (Thomas Moerschell, plasma-workspace MR #6214)

Plasma’s network settings now expose additional L2TP VPN options that were previously unavailable. (Mickaël Thomas, plasma-nm MR #480)

The old Air Plasma style (a lighter take on the original Oxygen style) is back, with fixes and improvements, too! (Filip Fila, oxygen MR #77)

The Oxygen cursor theme received a small visual fix to improve the appearance of the busy cursor. (Filip Fila, oxygen MR #89)

The cursor theme settings now show more accurate previews, which fixes issues like wobbling cursors, and makes the preview grid feel more stable. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6240)

System Settings’ various theme chooser pages are now consistent about whether you can delete the active theme (no), and also let you know why certain themes can’t be deleted: because they were installed by the OS, not the “get new stuff” system. (Sam Crawford, plasma-workspace MR #6222)

The Weather Report widget now shows a progress indicator while its popup is open but still loading the weather forecast from the server. (Bogdan Onofriichuk, kdeplasma-addons MR #993)

Frameworks 6.23

Combobox pop-ups through QtQuick-based apps and System Settings pages now use the standard menu styling, rather than a custom style. (Nate Graham, qqc2-desktop-style MR #497)

After

Before

Added styling for the new upstream SearchField component that was recently added to QtQuick itself. Now it looks like the KDE version that we created years ago before the Qt version existed. (Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano, qqc2-desktop-style MR #500)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.6

Fixed an issue on operating systems with asserts turned on (like KDE neon) that could sometimes crash Plasma when you launched apps. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #513312)

Plasma 6.6.0

Fixed a rare issue that could leave KWin without control of the mouse and keyboard at login. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #511611)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when moving around a Weather Report widget on the desktop. (Bogdan Onofriichuk, KDE Bugzilla #514200)

Fixed an issue in Discover when launched with Snap support that could prevent it being launched again after previously being closed. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Bugzilla #507217)

Fixed a case where the Plasma Bluetooth pairing wizard would fail to pair devices. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #495615)

The logout screen no longer fails to take focus if you raised the focus stealing level to “Medium” or higher, and manually de-focusing it no longer breaks your ability to re-focus it. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #514204 and Aleksey Rochev, KDE Bugzilla #511258)

The custom size ruler for Plasma panels no longer sometimes appears on the wrong screen of a multi-screen setup. (Vlad Zahorodnii, plasma-workspace MR #6215)

The “X notifications were received while Do Not Disturb was active” notification is no longer inappropriately saved to the notification history. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6223)

Fixed two semi-related issues with widgets that made them not let you pick the same color after deleting it, or configure the same mouse action after deleting it. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #514983 and KDE Bugzilla #449389)

The global menu on a newly-cloned panel on a different screen now realizes immediately that it’s on a new screen. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #514907)

Discover’s notification about ongoing updates no longer displays a nonsensically large number of updates under certain circumstances. (Harald Sitter, KDE Bugzilla #513676)

Plasma Browser Integration no longer exports Microsoft Teams calls as controllable media sources; it always omitted them in the past, but Microsoft changed the URL again, so we had to adapt to that once more. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #514870)

You can now move focus from the Application Dashboard widget’s search field using arrow keys, and also type accented characters using dead keys or the compose key as the first character in a search while the search field isn’t explicitly focused. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #511146 and KDE Bugzilla #510871)

Animated wallpapers explicitly set for the lock screen now play their animation as expected. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #460910)

Undoing the deletion of a panel widget no longer sometimes positions it far from where it was before. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #515107)

Ending the renaming of an item on the desktop by clicking on another item no longer starts a drag-selection for no good reason. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #514954)

The “Defaults” button on System Settings’ Accessibility page now works properly to reset non-default colorblindness modes. (Andrew Gigena, KDE Bugzilla #513489)

Plasma 6.7.0

Fixed a very nasty KWin bug that could, under certain rare circumstances relating to intensive Alt+Tab usage, cause the screen to go black. This change may be backported to Plasma 6.6 if it’s deemed safe enough. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #514828)

Frameworks 6.23

Fixed being unable to paste clipboard entries as text that were copied from a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet cell and then re-arranged in the clipboard history list. (Alexey Rochev, KDE Bugzilla #513701)

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.6.0

KRDP (the KDE library for remote desktop support) no longer requires systemd. (David Edmundson, krdp MR #141)

Plasma 6.7.0

KWin now supports the ext-background-effect-v1 Wayland protocol. This adds support for standardized background effects like blur, opening the door for visual consistency across apps using these effects. (Xaver Hugl, KWin MR #4890)

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!

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 bugfix mentioned here

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

This Week in Plasma: fixing all the things

Nate Graham, Rafal Krawczyk, and John Veness — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:03:52 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week the Plasma team focused almost entirely on bug fixing. And let’s let the results speak for themselves: we fixed 18 high and very high priority Plasma bugs, or 28% of all open ones! Lots of polishing for Plasma 6.6 to make it a great release.

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.7.0

Added a dedicated setup UI for configuring shared printers on Windows networks. (Mike Noe, KDE Bugzilla #406211)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.6.0

Desktop switching and Present Windows shortcuts now use the Meta key by default for more consistent system-wide behavior. (Antti Savolainen, kwin MR #8597)

Plasma can now report printers’ waste receptacle levels and notify users when they fill up. (Mike Noe, KDE Bugzilla #514525)

KRunner’s buttons have been reorganized to be consistent with other Plasma widgets, making the interface feel more familiar and coherent. (Taras Oleksyn, plasma-workspace MR #6203)

Plasma 6.7.0

System Settings’ Wi-Fi & Networking page now uses clearer Wi-Fi security labels, correctly showing WPA2 and WPA3 support for both Personal and Enterprise networks. (Lynne Megido, KDE Bugzilla #493238)

There are now keyboard shortcuts for switching virtual desktops and opening the Present Windows effect that use the Meta key, to be consistent with other globally-scoped keyboard shortcuts. (Antti Savolainen, KDE Bugzilla #508187)

Frameworks 6.23

Improved the visual fidelity of thumbnail images in open/save dialogs throughout Plasma and KDE apps. (Méven Car, KDE Bugzilla #489298)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.6

Fixed an issue that could sometimes make KWin crash after periods of idleness. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #513687)

Fixed an issue that would make Plasma crash when you disabled widgets in the System Tray and clicked the dialog window’s “OK” button rather than the “Apply” button. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #478625)

Fixed an issue that could sometimes make KWin crash after repeatedly pressing the “Activate window demanding attention” shortcut (Meta+Ctrl+A by default) while multiple windows were demanding attention. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #500748)

Fixed a common case where Plasma could crash after certain games crashed first. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #506562)

Fixed a common case where Plasma could crash when configured with a weather station from the Environment Canada source in its Weather Report widget. (Bohdan Onofriichuk, KDE Bugzilla #514553)

Fixed a case where changing the visibility of the Media Player widget in the System Tray while music was playing could make Plasma crash. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #514823)

Spectacle once again remembers the location where you last saved a screenshot the next time you save one. (Noah Davis, KDE Bugzilla #511649)

Fixed an issue causing 24” 16:9 aspect ratio monitors to get the wrong default resolution. (Anton Golubev, kwin MR #8681)

Plasma 6.6.0

Fixed a surprisingly common issue whereby KWin could sometimes crash when you frantically wiggled the pointer to try to stop a monitor from going to sleep. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #487660)

Fixed a case where KWin could crash when you deleted a virtual desktop that still had windows on it. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #8680)

Fixed another KWin crash, this one more random. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #8677)

Fixed a long-standing issue whereby tooltips opened by buttons in Plasma widget popups could move onto the panel and get stuck there after you closed the widget popups. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #475646)

Fixed an issue that made popups of panel widgets undesirably change their size when you moved their panel to an adjacent screen edge. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #512273)

Fixed an issue making certain sub-menus of Plasma widgets not have transparent backgrounds, which was especially visible with menu blurring turned on. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #513307)

Fixed an issue in the HDR calibrator tool that made long pieces of text overflow from their boxes. (Nate Graham and David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #514687)

Fixed an issue that made Plasma forget the IPSec certificate passwords of L2TP VPNs. (Mickaël Thomas, plasma-nm MR #460)

Fixed an issue causing apps launched using D-Bus activation to be omitted from System Monitor’s Applications table. (Arjen Hiemstra, KDE Bugzilla #510235)

Fixed an issue in System Monitor that could make the Applications table’s “Details” panel un-scrollable under certain circumstances. (Arjen Hiemstra, KDE Bugzilla #506150)

Fixed an issue in Discover that could sometimes make Flatpak apps’ languages packages fail to get grouped with the apps. (Harald Sitter, KDE Bugzilla #513111)

Plasma 6.7.0

Fixed an issue that broke KRunner’s Activities plugin from actually finding any activities. (Sam Morris, KDE Bugzilla #514000)

Fixed an issue that caused long boot menu entries to be cut off in the Breeze GRUB Menu styling. (Sébastien Bouchard, KDE Bugzilla #513107)

Frameworks 6.23

Fixed an issue that caused a large variety of crashes in Plasma and KDE apps related to devices appearing and disappearing. (Nicolas Fella, solid MR #232)

Fixed an issue making KWallet crash on OpenSUSE-based operating systems. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #490788)

Fixed an issue in Kirigami-based System Settings pages and apps that made it impossible to return to the first page when using a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Youssef Al-Bor3y, KDE Bugzilla #511295)

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.6.0

Plasma’s system monitoring infrastructure received further fixes to improve OpenBSD support. (Rafael Sadowski, libksysguard MR #454)

PackageKit 1.3.4

Implemented support for DNF5 in PackageKit, which fixes a huge number of issues relevant to people using Discover on Fedora-based operating systems. (Neal Gompa, packagekit PR #931)

How You Can Help

“This Week in Plasma” still needs your help! Publishing these posts is time-consuming and needs community assistance to be sustainable. Right now there are two ways to help:

Work can be coordinated in the relevant Matrix room.

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 bugfix mentioned here

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

This Week in Plasma: dark mode switch and global push-to-talk

Nate Graham, John Veness, Rafal Krawczyk, and Lubos Krystynek — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:03:54 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week we closed the door on features for Plasma 6.6, which opened another one for those features to land in 6.7. As a result, several features were merged for Plasma 6.7, including some particularly juicy ones!

As for Plasma 6.6, this starts the one-month period where the core Plasma team focuses almost entirely on fixing bugs. As you’ll see below, we already fixed quite a few this week! So there’s a huge amount of stuff to go over, and let’s get right to it:

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

System Monitor now lets you set the priority of processes graphically, just like the older KSysGuard app did. (Matthieu Carteron, plasma-systemmonitor MR #381 and libksysguard MR #455)

(The lack of a darkened underlay is unintentional; we’ll get that fixed up soon.)

Plasma 6.7.0

Added a switch to the Brightness and Color widget that lets you instantly go from light mode to dark mode (or vice versa)! (Kai Uwe Broulik, powerdevil MR #576)

(At some point we’ll add a nice cross-fade transition here, too.)

Added a global push-to-talk feature: if you set a push-to-talk key, all microphones will be muted until the specified key is held down. (Kai Uwe Broulik, Aleix Pol Gonzalez, and Shubham Arora, plasma-pa MR #394, kglobalaccel MR #41, and plasma-workspace MR #6126)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.5.6

The HDR calibration wizard now temporarily disables Night Light while calibrating, to ensure that you get an accurate result. (Xaver Hugl, kscreen MR #448)

Plasma 6.6.0

Mounting a removable disk no longer performs a file system scan by default; now this is a manual action you initiate from the expanded actions list. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bug #505852)

The screen chooser dialog now includes a search/filter field so you can easily find a screen by name even when there are a zillion windows open. (Harald Sitter, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #506)

Kicker’s search results no longer flicker or resize while typing, keeping columns stable during searches for a smoother and snappier experience. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #3439)

HDR Calibrator now offers a summary page with a setting to better support Windows HDR applications and games. (Xaver Hugl, kscreen MR #443)

Replaced some technical gobbledygook in the titles of Bluetooth status and error notifications with more relevant and user-friendly text. (Nate Graham, bluedevil MR #238)

(The body text isn’t great either, but that’s also being worked on!)

If you happen to have a keyboard or other input device with “Seek Forwards” and “Seek Backwards” buttons, pressing them now works as expected out of the box. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bug #514680)

Plasma 6.7.0

System Settings’ Game Controller, Mouse, and Touchpad pages now only appear when the devices they configure are present. (Alexander Wilms, plasma-desktop MR #3436)

Discover now shows sub-categories in its “Games” group for game launchers and game tools. (Jakob Dev, discover MR #1224)

Improved how the global edit mode works with a touchscreen. (Shubham Arora, plasma-workspace MR #6161 and plasma-desktop MR #3442)

On System Settings’ Accessibility page, the Mouse Navigation tooltip now explains how to switch mouse click modes with the numeric keypad. (Jaimukund Bhan, KDE Bug #505687)

Searching for “memory” now turns up the System Monitor app in search results. (Nicolas Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6194)

Frameworks 6.23

Improved the touch-friendliness of open/save dialogs. (Méven Car, KDE Bug #513606)

Improved the icon selection algorithm for missing icons so that it no longer returns downscaled versions of much larger icons, which may have a completely different style. (Alexander Wilms, KDE Bug #466678)

By default, sidebars and left edge drawers in Kirigami-using apps now have exactly the width needed to avoid being too wide or too narrow. Some apps still override the default width, and that will need to be un-done now, so expect the weirdly-sized sidebars to get fixed over time, rather than all at once when you upgrade to Frameworks 6.23. (Marco Martin, KDE Bug #505693)

KDE Gear 26.04.0

System Settings’ pages related to audio CDs (if you have them installed) now only appear when the computer has any optical drives. (Nate Graham, KDE Bug #513661 and KDE Bug #513664)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.5

Fixed a case where KWin could crash on launch when the GPU did something weird when trying to render screencasts or window thumbnails. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #513710)

Fixed an issue that made the fingerprint enrollment dialog’s “Add” button go missing if you canceled enrollment and then immediately re-opened the dialog. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bug #514088)

Fixed an issue that sometimes made Weather Report widget’s tooltip use the wrong unit and display numbers with excessive decimal places. (Ismael Asensio, KDE Bug #514419)

Fixed an issue that made System Settings’ search field sometimes not show the proper language-specific placeholder text. (Albert Astals Cid, KDE Bug #512187)

Plasma 6.5.6

Fixed one of the top Plasma crashes that could happen when turning off certain screens. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bug #511757)

Fixed a crash in System Settings’ Game Controller page when using certain devices and versions of the SDL library. (David Edmundson, KDE Bug #511859)

If you have multiple Plasma panels, clicking on different ones over and over again while in edit mode no longer makes multiple panel edit dialogs appear. (Marco Martin, KDE Bug #513135)

Plasma 6.6.0

Fixed a KWin crash that could happen when waking up a laptop connected to an external screen. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #514229)

Fixed an issue relating to focus on the lock screen with multi-monitor setups. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bug #512028)

Discover’s window no longer becomes un-maximized when any popup dialogs appear. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bug #503801)

Having an exotic network setup or a lot of Docker containers no longer breaks the layout of System Settings’ Remote Desktop page while the feature is turned on. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bug #513504)

Plasma 6.7.0

If you’ve turned on the login sound, it now plays at the right time. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bug #510923)

Frameworks 6.22.1

Fixed a regression that made KDE Connect crash due to clipboard shenanigans. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bug #514512)

Frameworks 6.23

Fixed two issues with tooltips that could sometimes cause them to be offset or rapidly appear and disappear in the Kickoff Application Launcher widget. (Alexey Rochev, KDE Bug #510860 and KDE Bug #511875)

Fixed some bugs and visual glitches with certain sidebars and list items in Kirigami-based apps when using an RTL language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Marco Martin and Christoph Wolk, kirigami MR #2027 and kirigami MR #2026)

Fixed a strange issue that could cause notifications from the Quod Libet music player specifically to stop appearing. (Alexander Wilms, KDE Bug #489910)

Symbolic icons for KDE Connect now re-color themselves properly when using a non-default color scheme. (Ángel Navarro, breeze-icons MR #522)

Qt 6.10.3

Fixed two of the most common Plasma crashes that were caused by Qt’s QML Compiler doing something weird under the hood. (Ulf Hermann, KDE Bug #513527 and KDE Bug #513012)

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.6.0

Implemented version 2 of the Wayland color management protocol. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #8033)

Reduced some visual glitches in Firefox when turning on its off-by-default HDR mode. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #514599)

Plasma 6.7.0

Implemented support for network activity monitoring on FreeBSD in the System Monitor app and widgets. (Jesper Schmitz Mouridsen, ksystemstats MR #41)

How You Can Help

Since the Plasma 6.6 beta period has commenced, this is a great time to submit bug reports for all the niggling issues you’ve been suffering with but haven’t formally reported yet. We’re focusing more than usual on bug triage too, so your reports will be seen.

There’s a new Troubleshooting help page that can help narrow down issues, too. Check it out! And helping to triage other people’s reported issues is a big help, too.

In addition, “This Week in Plasma” needs your help! Publishing these posts is time-consuming and needs community assistance to be sustainable. Right now there are two ways to help:

Work can be coordinated in the relevant Matrix room.

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 bugfix mentioned here

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

This Week in Plasma: car of the year edition

Nate Graham, Lubos Krystynek, Rafal Krawczyk, and John Veness — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:01:00 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

Let’s thank Lubos Krystynek, Rafal Krawczyk, and John Veness for stepping up to help with this week’s issue. Thanks, guys!

This week, the first car running KWin won the “Car of the Year” award. Yes, really — KDE in the car! Here’s KDE’s Victoria Fischer talking about it at Qt World Summit 2023:

Almost all of these posts end with “KDE has become important in the world…” and I think this is a good reminder that it’s true, not just some empty platitude. KDE is important. And all of you building or using KDE’s software are important, too.

But KDE is not only important to cars; we’re incredibly important to computers! And on that subject, some really nice features and user interface improvements landed for the upcoming Plasma 6.6 release. The hard feature freeze is coming up soon, at which point we’ll move into full bug-fixing and polishing mode.

But until then, enjoy some juicy new goodies! Check it out:

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

You can now save your current visual settings as a new global theme! (Vlad Zahorodnii, plasma-desktop MR #6097)

Added a “Forget device” action to the Bluetooth system tray widget, allowing users to remove paired devices without opening System Settings. (Andrew Gigena, KDE Bug #434691)

You can now search for processes in System Monitor based on their full command-line invocation when the “Command” column is visible. (Alexey Rochev, KDE Bug #448331)

On supported systems, the logout screen now mentions when the system will restart into a different operating system or boot option after it reboots. (Nikolay Kochulin, plasma-workspace MR #5469)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.6.0

The Power and Battery widget now tells you what specific power management actions apps are blocking, instead of assuming that they’re all blocking both sleep and screen locking. (Jakob Petsovits, KDE Bug #418433)

System Settings’ Thunderbolt page now hides itself when the device doesn’t support Thunderbolt. (Alexander Wilms, plasma-thunderbolt MR #47)

When there are many windows open, the Task Manager widget will now scroll to the active one when you open its window thumbnail list. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bug #499716)

Notifications no longer waste space showing the same icon in two places. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6151)

Spectacle now remembers the size (and on X11, also the position) of its main window across launches. (Aviral Singh, KDE Bug #499652)

Made multiple UI improvements to the “Configure Columns” dialog in System Monitor. (Arjen Hiemstra, plasma-systemmonitor MR #405)

In the Weather Report widget, when a weather station isn’t reporting the current wind speed, the widget now says it doesn’t know the wind speed, rather than claiming it’s “calm”. (Tobias Fella, kdeplasma-addons MR #969)

The Kickoff Application Menu widget now does a better job of handling a huge number of favorite apps. Now the favorites column eventually becomes scrollable, instead of letting icons overlap. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bug #424067)

You can now find System Settings’ Wallpaper page by searching for “desktop background” and some other related terms. (Shubham Arora, plasma-workspace MR #6152)

Frameworks 6.23

Made it possible to see more items at once in the “Get New [thing]” dialogs. (Nate Graham, frameworks-knewstuff MR #380)

Open/Save dialogs now use relative-style date formatting for recent dates and times, which matches how Dolphin shows them. (Méven Car, frameworks-kio MR #2103)

Folders that show thumbnails of their contents now refresh the thumbnail immediately when any of those files are removed. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bug #497259)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.5

Fixed a strange issue that broke key repeat only in the Brave web browser. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bug #513637)

Fixed an issue that could make the panel configuration dialog appear on the wrong screen with certain panel and screen arrangements. (Aleksey Rochev, plasma-workspace MR #6140)

Fixed two issues with the “Show Alternatives” popup: one that made it get cut off outside of the screen area for widgets positioned on certain areas of the desktop, and another that made it not disappear when it lost focus. (Aleksey Rochev, KDE Bug #511188 and KDE Bug #511187)

Plasma 6.6.0

Fixed an issue that made Plasma quit when you disconnected the last screen. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #513003)

Fixed an issue with the Applications table on System Monitor’s Overview page being blurry with certain scale factors. We had already previously fixed this, but it turned out there were more remaining cases where it still happened, so this should take care of the rest! (Arjen Hiemstra, KDE Bug #445759)

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.6.0

Implemented support in Plasma for the up-and-coming oo7 Secret Service provider. (Marco Martin and Harald Sitter, plasma-workspace MR #6109)

Fixed a hilarious issue that caused the wallpaper to bounce a tiny bit with certain fractional scale factors on secondary screens using direct scan-out while on a very recent kernel version. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #513277)

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.

You can help KDE by directly getting involved. 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.

For example, helping out to write these posts is warmly appreciated. Anyone interested in getting involved should check out the evolving documentation on the topic.

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 bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

This Week in Plasma: new year, new accessibility features!

Nate Graham, and John Veness — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:01:00 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

Plasma developers are starting to trickle back from their vacations, and are polishing up and merging work that was nearing completion late last year. Among them are some impactful accessibility features, plus lots more holiday goodies!

Also, allow us to thank everyone who donated to KDE’s 2025 end-of-year fundraiser. Thanks to all of you, we raised an additional €385,000 for KDE e.V. — a staggering, awe-inspiring sum of money! KDE e.V. will put it to good use keeping KDE financially and technically sustainable for years to come.

Finally, please welcome to TWiP John Veness, who has helped out with this week's post! Contributions here are warmly appreciated.

Anyway, let’s check out the work:

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

The “Slow Keys” accessibility feature has been implemented for Plasma’s Wayland session! (Martin Riethmayer, KDE bug #490826)

The Zoom effect now has a mode where the pointer never leaves the center of the physical screen. (Ritchie Frodomar, KDE bug #513145)

The Emoji Selector app now lets you choose a preferred skin tone for emojis of hands and people. (Tobias Ozór, plasma-desktop MR #3399)

It’s now possible to disable the visible timeout indicators on notifications if they stress you out. (Anton Birkel, KDE bug #411613)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.5.5

When Discover prompts you to search the internet for an app that it couldn’t find, the search string now includes the correct OS name if you’re not using a Linux-based OS. (Jaimukund Bhan, KDE bug #513366)

Plasma 6.6.0

Using a game controller will now count as “activity”, stopping the system from automatically going to sleep or locking the screen. (Yelsin Sepulveda, KDE bug #328987)

When a laptop is plugged in or unplugged while asleep, it now wakes up being aware of the current state. (Nate Graham, KDE bug #507203)

System Settings’ Touchscreen page now hides itself when there are no touchscreens connected. (Nicolas Fella, KDE bug #513566)

The screen chooser OSD now has a button to open the full System Settings page if none of the built-in options are relevant. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kscreen MR #442)

Creating a sticky note on the desktop via middle-click paste now focuses the text area immediately, ready for editing. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kdeplasma-addons MR #967)

Subtly improved the appearance of overlay badges on Plasma widgets, particularly the ones in the system tray. (Noah Davis, plasma-workspace MR #6118)

In the Application Dashboard launcher widget, category highlights now span the full width of the area, making it more visually consistent. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #3408)

The Large Icons Task Switcher style now does a better job of showing a large number of icons by wrapping them onto multiple rows rather than scrolling horizontally. (Christoph Wolk, KDE bug #513436)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.5

Fixed an issue that made some Plasma popups inappropriately stay open when they lost focus. (Aleksey Rochev, KDE bug #511187)

Plasma 6.6.0

Possibly fixed one of the most common panel-related Plasma crashes. (David Edmundson, plasma-workspace MR #6086)

Fixed an issue in Spectacle that could make some toolbars in Rectangular Region mode appear off-screen when using a multi-monitor setup where not all screens share a baseline. (Mario Roß, KDE bug #468794)

Fixed a bug that could make the “New!” badge on newly-installed apps in Kickoff overflow for apps with very long names. (Christoph Wolk, KDE bug #513272)

Fixed a weird issue that could make the Task Manager start a drag-and-drop operation when double-clicking a task right on the screen edge. (Aleksey Rochev, KDE bug #501922)

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.6.0

Improved and fixed support for OpenBSD in multiple places. (Rafael Sadowski, KPipeWire MR #229, KInfoCenter MR #284, Solid MR #228)

How You Can Help

“This Week in Plasma” needs your help! Publishing these posts is time-consuming and needs community assistance to be sustainable. Right now there are two ways to help:

Work can be coordinated in the relevant Matrix room.

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 bugfix mentioned here

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

8 years of “This Week in Plasma”

Nate Graham — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 06:15:00 +0000

Happy holidays to all in the KDE universe who celebrate them! As 2025 draws to a close, I thought it would be a good time to take stock.

“This Week in Plasma” began 8 years ago as a development report for KDE’s Usability & Productivity goal, which had just been democratically selected by the community in the very first round of the new KDE Goals process.

Back then it wasn’t called “This Week in Plasma” (or “TWiP” for short), but eventually it would gain and change names, and move off my personal blog and onto KDE’s infrastructure.

During these past 8 years, I’ve done my best to keep the wider KDE community informed about what’s going on almost every week! And I’m constantly amazed and humbled by the positive feedback it’s generated.

The march of time and accumulation of responsibilities

My own role in KDE has changed substantially during these 8 years. I started out in 2017 as a volunteer and fell in love with KDE, squeezing my KDE time into a long daily train commute to and from work. And by 2019 I had a full-time job at Blue Systems, doing what I loved. In 2022 I was elected to the KDE e.V. board of directors, until October of this year. Each of these transitions heralded the accumulation of more responsibilities beyond TWiP.

And at the beginning of this year, everything changed again when I became the co-owner and CEO of Techpaladin Software, the successor of Blue Systems’ consultancy business, and an employer of over a dozen rockstar KDE developers.

This has been the largest career shift in my life, and caused my time to become more limited than ever before. It’s possible some readers may have noticed the quality of TWiP content slipping over the past year; it’s not a coincidence, and I apologize for not being able to do a better job.

I need help

I truly want to keep publishing this blog, but there comes a point where I have to face facts: my time and energy budgets are not as unlimited as I wish they were. In addition, my children are getting older; they’re 9 and 13, and they need their dad to do more than just work and work and work and work and work some more.

So it’s time to begin the painful but necessary process of ensuring that those budgets remain big enough to cover my work and family responsibilities.

In 2026, I’m actively looking for a person or team interested in taking over TWiP. Until then, I plan to reduce the frequency of posts, based on how busy my schedule is. Expect one every two weeks, or even every three or four weeks.

How You Can Help

If anyone reading would like to see TWiP remain a weekly fixture as much as I do, the best way to make it happen is to get involved and help out with it! I would be thrilled to hand off TWiP to the next generation.

Nothing about TWiP is particularly difficult, but it does take time. Time to notice or seek out relevant changes, time to collect them in a big list, time to sort them for relevance to the readership, time to write a little blurb for each of them, time to take screenshots showcasing the changes, and time to edit and polish the post.

I’m happy to teach, coach, or mentor anyone who wants to get involved. So if you’ve been wondering how you can get involved in something that matters without technical skills beyond basic markdown and git, this is a perfect way to do it. And if you are technical, I’m sure there are low-hanging-fruit opportunities for automation that I never pursued (I did try AI a few times, but the results were always horrible).

You can reach out to me about it at nate@kde.org, or the relevant Matrix room, or any other relevant means of getting in touch that you might already know about. Please do!

And finally

I’d like to take the opportunity to thank the readers and community members. This blog post series is something I never really expected to become popular, and it was my pleasure to publish it (almost) every week!

Today Plasma and KDE in general are strong and prosperous, with growing bases of users, hardware partners, distros pre-installing our software, and small-donor financing. In some ways KDE is outgrowing TWiP; it’s no longer really necessary to provide weekly evidence that we’re still keeping the lights on. The evidence is all around us!

But it’s still a nice thing to have, I think. I personally would feel sad if I had to abandon TWiP without anyone to hand it off to. So if you’re interested in getting involved, please reach out!

If helping to take over TWiP isn’t your cup of tea, consider donating to KDE’s 2025 end-of-year fundraiser. It’s already demolished past records by raising over €325,000, but every little bit helps! This level of funding can support significant projects and keep KDE independent for years to come. And that’s what we all want.

So here’s to a great 2025 for KDE, and may 2026 be even better!

This Week in Plasma: ambient light sensor support

Nate Graham — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 07:01:00 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week many KDE contributors wound down their activities in preparation for some well-deserved rest. But that didn’t stop the merging of some impactful work anyway!

This will be 2025’s last This Week in Plasma post; I too will take a break next week. Happy holidays for those who celebrate, and I’ll see you all in 2026!

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

Implemented support for automatic brightness adjustment on devices with ambient light sensors! (Xaver Hugl, KDE bug #502122)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.5.5

Improved KRunner’s search matching algorithms to prioritize partial matches at the beginning of apps’ names, descriptions, and keywords. This should fix issues like searching for “ala” and getting “KAlarm” as the top match instead of “Alacritty”. (Harald Sitter, KDE bug #512400 and KDE bug #512399)

Plasma 6.6.0

Added a workaround for Windows games with HDR support to make sure their colors still look good when run in WINE or Proton. (Xaver Hugl, KDE bug #509114)

Spectacle’s notifications about screenshots now include an “Open Containing Folder” button, and persist in the history if you don’t manually close them. This should make it harder to miss where your screenshots got saved to. (Noah Davis, Spectacle MR #499)

Fixed an issue in Spectacle that made the bottom toolbar in Rectangular Region mode get cut off when the selected region is close to the bottom of a screen with certain screen setups. (Mario Roß, Spectacle MR # 498)

System Settings’ Wi-Fi & Networking page now shows information about the connected Wi-Fi networks, just like the System Tray popup does. (Alexander Wilms, KDE bug #471071)

Discover now shows available updates within the app in a fancier-looking way. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE bug #509926)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.5

Disabling visual customization of Plasma via the Kiosk system now hides relevant buttons on System Settings’ Quick Settings page. (Nicolas Fella, KDE bug #511381)

6.6.0

Made opacity window rules work for picture-in-picture windows. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE bug #513374)

Frameworks 6.22

Fixed a large number of clipboard-related issues on Wayland. (David Edmundson and David Redondo, kguiaddons MR #191)

The next release of WallpaperEngineKDE

Fixed one of the most common crashes in Plasma, caused by using the 3rd-party WallpaperEngineKDE wallpaper plugin. (catsout, wallpaper-scene-renderer Issue #13)

Other bug information of note:

5 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
59 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 55 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.5.5

Fixed an issue that prevented KWin from using direct scanout when the Battle.net launcher is open. (Xaver Hugl, KDE bug #513203)

Plasma 6.6.0

Reduced frame drop on monitors with extremely high refresh rates. (Xaver Hugl, KDE bug #513296)

Implemented the ability for portal-based applications to actively inhibit logout, for example because they have unsaved documents open. (David Edmundson, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #391)

How You Can Help

Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. In total, KDE has raised over €300,000 during this fundraiser! The average donation is about €25. KDE truly is funded by you!

This money will help keep KDE strong and independent for years to come, and I’m just in awe of the generosity of the KDE community and userbase. Thank you all for helping KDE to grow and prosper!

If money is tight, you can help KDE by directly getting involved. 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.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

This Week in Plasma: Wayland screen mirroring and custom modes

Nate Graham — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:01:00 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week the team made significant progress on KWin’s Wayland screen support. Specifically, better mirroring and custom modes — both items on the “Known Significant Issues” page — have been implemented for Plasma 6.6! The remaining items on that page are areas of active focus, too, as we race towards the Wayland finish line.

…But wait, there’s more!

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

The Window List widget lets you filter out windows not on the current screen, virtual desktop, or activity — just like the Task Manager widgets do. (Shubham Arora, plasma-desktop MR #3341)

Discover now lets you install and remove fonts on distros with package managers that use the PackageKit library. (Joey Riches, discover MR #1113)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.6.0

The “Minimize All” KWin script (which is included by default but not enabled) now also lets you minimize all windows besides the active one using the Meta+Shift+O keyboard shortcut. (Luis Bocanegra, bug #197952)

KWin now sets reasonable default scale factors for newly-connected TVs. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #8537)

Several related menu items in the context menus of the Kicker/Kickoff/Application Dashboard widgets have been grouped together. (Kisaragi Hiu, plasma-desktop MR #3381)

The kscreen-doctor tool now lets you know that it’s possible to mirror your screens. (Nicolas Fella, libkscreen MR #267)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.4

Fixed a recent regression with desktop icons not staying on the right screen with some multi-screen arrangements. (Błażej Szczygieł, plasma-desktop MR #3330)

The Meta+P shortcut to open the screen chooser OSD now works on immutable-style distros. (Nate Graham, kscreen MR #440)

Plasma 6.5.5

Fixed a recent regression that caused screen freezes on some hardware right before power management kicked in. We’ve asked distros to backport the fix as ASAP as possible so everyone gets it as quickly. (Xaver Hugl, bug #513151)

Fixed a case where KWin could crash in the X11 session when using an older Valve Index headset. (David Edmundson, bug #507677)

Fixed an issue that could make stray modifier key events get sent to XWayland-using apps, especially when switching to them using keyboard shortcuts involving modifier keys. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a case where KWin was handling drag-and-dropped text incorrectly, which could make drops fail in some apps. (Vlad Zahorodnii, bug #512235)

Fixed two screen locker issues that could make it slower to unlock via KDE Connect, and make it erroneously flash some text about a fingerprint or smart card reader when they’re not relevant. (Fushan Wen, kscreenlocker MR #296)

Fixed the back button in Folder View widgets’ list view display style. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #3387)

Fixed an issue in System Monitor that made it possible to end critical processes using the keyboard. (Oliver Schramm, bug #510464)

Other bug information of note:

5 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
55 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 37 last week). Current list of bugs

You might note a large increase in the number of HI priority bugs this week. This is because we’re beginning a quality initiative and using the HI priority level to track bugs to fix quickly. We want to make sure Plasma is getting extra large amounts of polish and stability work these days!

Other Notable Things in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.5.4

Plugged a GPU memory leak in KDE’s portal implementation. (David Edmundson, bug #494138)

Plasma 6.5.5

Fixed a case where .desktop files with spec-violating names could cause massive amounts of log spam. (David Redondo, bug #512562)

Plasma 6.6.0

Massively improved support for screen mirroring in the Wayland session. Now it works really well! (Xaver Hugl, bug #481222 and kscreen MR #439)

You can now use the kscreen-doctor tool to add custom screen modes, useful for supporting exotic or misbehaving screens in the Wayland session. (Xaver Hugl, bug #456697)

Made the KWin rule to force a titlebar and frame also work for windows of native-Wayland apps. (Xaver Hugl, bug #452240)

You can now move windows with Meta+drag when using a drawing tablet stylus. (Vlad Zahorodnii, bug #509949)

How You Can Help

Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. In total, KDE has raised over €280,000 during this fundraiser! The average donation is about €25. KDE truly is funded by you!

This money will help keep KDE strong and independent for years to come, and I’m just in awe of the generosity of the KDE community and userbase. Thank you all for helping KDE to grow and prosper!

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

This Week in Plasma: Better hardware support

Nate Graham — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:01:00 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week saw a bunch of user interface improvements and bug fixing, especially for the drawing tablets, printers, and monitors. Hardware is quirky!

But of course that’s not all; check out the rest, too:

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.6.0

You can now Alt+click/double-click on desktop items to see their properties, just like you can in Dolphin. (Méven Car, plasma-desktop MR #3349)

When a printer runs low on ink for multiple cartridges simultaneously, all the messages about this are now condensed into a single notification, instead of showing a separate notification for each low ink cartridge. (Mike Noe, print-manager MR #291)

System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page now makes it more obvious when the lack of configurable pad buttons is due to a missing driver. (Joshua Goins, plasma-desktop MR #3234)

Spectacle now offers a Cancel button in the rectangular region overlay, so you can get out of it without having to press the Esc key. (Taras Oleksyn, bug #490980)

Locking the screen from the Application Launcher widget now closes it before locking so it’s not somewhat awkwardly left open after you unlock. (Christoph Wolk, bug #508725)

On distros that make you authenticate to toggle the feature to set the date and time automatically, closing the authentication window without authenticating no longer makes the page complain about an error. (David Edmundson, bug #501966)

Apps launched from the Favorites view of the Kickoff, Kicker, and Dashboard widgets are now added to the “Recent Apps” section. (Christoph Wolk, bug #449834 and bug #435356)

Did a pass over several pages in System Settings to make sure they follow the KDE Human Interface Guidelines more closely. (Nate Graham, plasma-desktop MR #3309)

You’re no longer allowed to try to change the usernames of logged-in users, since this doesn’t work anyway. (Nate Graham bug #469665)

You’re now warned about the potential consequences if you try to disable the System Tray’s built-in Notifications widget, since those consequences may not be obvious. (Nate Graham, plasma-workspace MR #6044)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.4

Fixed an issue that made the Orca screen reader’s “learn” mode speak too much and send extraneous keystrokes to apps. (Nicolas Fella, bug #512189)

Fixed an issue that could occasionally cause a crash when charging your system after the critical battery level notification appeared. (Anthony Fieroni, powerdevil MR #594)

Fixed an issue that made the screen turn black with certain older monitors directly connected via an analog VGA cable. (Xaver Hugl, bug #512146)

Fixed another source of the issue that made desktop icons move to the wrong screen of a multi-screen arrangement on login. (Błażej Szczygieł, bug #512381)

Fixed an issue that made it impossible to configure certain buttons of the Wacom Pen Pro 3D stylus. (Joshua Goins, bug #511488)

System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page now does a better job of handling weird tablets that say they have two styluses when they really only have one. (Joshua Goins, bug #508084)

Fixed an issue that made Plasma inaccurately warn that your printer was low on ink when it sent an unexpected ink level code but wasn't actually low on ink. (Mike Noe, bug #512602)

Fixed an issue that made the Task Manager widget’s “Forget recent [thing]” menu items unreliable for certain apps. (Méven Car, bug #480276)

Fixed a visual glitch in the Track Mouse effect when using a high DPI scale factor. (Xaver Hugl, bug #510029)

Plasma 6.6.0

Fixed an issue that made the Task Manager widget’s “Forget” action for specific files only take effect after Plasma was restarted. (Christoph Wolk, bug #503840)

Frameworks 6.21

Fixed an issue that could crash the open/save dialogs when you double-clicked on a column header while in Details mode. (David Edmundson, frameworks-kio MR #2070)

Fixed an issue that could make popups invoked from folders on the desktop misbehave when created from symlinks. (Lluc Simó Margalef, bug #479350)

Frameworks 6.22

Fixed an issue in the Quick Launch widget that made icons start dragging after right-clicking them. (Jonathan Marten, bug #384009)

Other bug information of note:

5 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
37 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 36 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.6.0

Implemented support for for per-DRM-plane color pipelines. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #6600)

Plasma now re-checks the battery level after waking from sleep, which handles the case of the battery draining (or charging) while asleep in such a manner that it would be appropriate to show or hide a notification about the battery level. (Ramil Nurmanov, powerdevil MR #592)

How You Can Help

Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. Believe it or not, the fundraiser has topped €100,000! And that’s just for the fundraiser itself; the yearly donation pop-up has also raised another €100k in just the past five days (!!!).

It’s kind of amazing. This money will help keep KDE strong and independent for years to come, and I’m just in awe of the generosity of the KDE community and userbase. Thank you all for helping KDE to grow and prosper!

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

This Week in Plasma: lots of cool stuff

Nate Graham — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:01:00 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week saw quite a lot of feature work and user interface polish for Plasma 6.6! Have a look:

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

There are now global actions for seeking forwards or backwards 5 or 30 seconds in the currently playing media. These work as long as the current media player supports letting other apps control seeking via MPRIS. The actions don’t have keyboard shortcuts assigned by default, but you can set them yourself. (Christoph Wolk, link)

You can now configure the Window List widget to show its menu on hover, or to hide the icon and only show the name of the active window. (Shubham Arora, link 1 and link 2)

You can now configure the order of the icons shown in the Lock/Logout widget. (Shubham Arora, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.6.0

Continued to polish up the XDG portal dialogs. This time the screen & window chooser dialog has been simplified and improved some more. (Harald Sitter, link)

Canceling a paste of some files onto Plasma’s desktop no longer produces a pointless error notification. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Added pin buttons to the Web Browser and Audio Volume widgets so that if you have either them in standalone form on a panel, you can keep their popups open while you’re still using them. (Alexander Lohnau and Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)

Improved the usability of searching using the Kickoff Application Launcher widget in several ways: now you can use the arrow keys to navigate from the search results view back to the search field, and new search results that come in late don’t cause the selection highlight to jump around. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2)

Improved the appearance and usability of the disks shown in Info Center’s S.M.A.R.T. Status page. (Joshua Goins, link)

Clearing the clipboard while it happens to be showing a QR code for one of the now-cleared items now dismisses the QR code, too. (Fushan Wen, link)

The Kicker Application Menu widget no longer very briefly flashes a message saying “No matches found” right after you search for things. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Improved the experience of rapidly moving the pointer over top-level menu items in the Kicker Application widget; now the sub-menus appear in the same way they do for other menus in apps. (Christoph Wolk, link)

When using the Kicker Application Menu widget on a right screen-edge panel, sub-sub-menus now open to the left of their parent, rather than on the right where they cover up the main menu. This also now works properly with an RTL language and a left screen-edge panel. (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2)

Frameworks 6.21, with the full effect arriving in Plasma 6.6.0

The headers of Kirigami-based apps are now the same height as those of QtWidgets-based apps. In the process of improving this, we also managed to equalize the padding on all four sides of highlighted list items, and make them consistent with the outer padding of header items, too. (Marco Martin, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, and link 7)

The Fifteen Puzzle widget now has a nice new icon, and also uses a symbolic icon when placed on a panel. (Martin Sh, link 1 and link 2)

Frameworks 6.21

Reverted a change made a few months ago that hid .desktop files with NoDisplay=true set on them from apps’ “Open with” menus. While the original change seemed technically correct, it had negative side effects outweighing its advantages. (Nate Graham, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.4

Fixed a random Plasma crash. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Fixed a case where turning on automatic updates in Discover would just make Discover crash in the background rather than running the updates. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)

Fixed an issue that broke pasting images from the clipboard into Dolphin. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a case where drawing using certain oddly-behaving drawing tablets would draw outside of the screen area. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a case where re-mapping drawing tablet stylus buttons didn‘t work. (Joshua Goins, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

Fixed an issue that mangled the desktop icon arrangement when dragging something to the desktop while it was using one of the automatic sorting modes. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)

Fixed an issue that made certain GPUs get displayed as “llvmpipe” in Info Center. (Oleg Gorobets and Harald Sitter, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed some issues that made Plasma’s desktop sometimes fail to notice newly-created, -deleted, or -changed files. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)

Fixed an issue that prevented re-opening the virtual keyboard immediately after closing it, but before clicking or re-focusing anything else. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Frameworks 6.21

Fixed an issue that mangled the display of devices whose names contain Unicode characters in USB plug/unplug notifications. (Nicolas Fella, link)

When you drag and drop an item from a Dolphin window that’s accessing a network location that requires Kerberos authentication, dropping it on the desktop now successfully downloads the file. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Other bug information of note:

5 very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
36 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 31 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.6.0

Implemented support for XRandr emulation in KWin, which allows it to behave sensibly when running XWayland-using apps that make use of X11 APIs to change the screen resolution in a way that requires letterboxing or pillarboxing. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Improved the performance of the rectangular box you can drag on the desktop to select items. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)

Implemented support for the standard “reduced motion” setting that lets apps know that you’d like animations minimized. Now it’s toggled on automatically when you disable animations in System Settings. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Plasma 6.5.4

Fixed a memory leak in Plasma. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

How You Can Help

Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. Believe it or not, we’re up to almost €90,000 raised in a month and a half. This money will help keep KDE strong and independent for years to come, and I’m just in awe of the generosity of the KDE community and userbase. Thank you all for helping KDE to grow and prosper!

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

This Week in Plasma: UI and performance improvements

Nate Graham — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:01:00 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week there were many user interface and performance improvements — some quite consequential. So let’s get right into it!

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

Windows can now be selectively excluded from screen recording! This can be invoked from the titlebar context menu, Task Manager context menu, and window rules. (Stanislav Aleksandrov, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.6.0

With a dark color scheme, the blur effect now produces a blur that’s darker (ideally back to the level seen in Plasma 6.4) and also more vibrant in cases where there are bright colors behind it. People seemed to like this! But for those who don’t, the saturation value of the blur effect is now user-configurable, so you can dial it in to your preferred level. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

When clicking on grouped Task Manager icons to cycle through their windows, full-screen windows will no longer always be raised first. Now, windows will be raised in the order of their last use. (Grégori Mignerot, link)

Did a round of UI polishing on the portal remote control dialog to make it look better and read more naturally. (Nate Graham and Joshua Goins, link 1 link 2, link 3 and link 4)

Portal remote control request dialog

Portal remote control tray icon

When you open the Kickoff Application Launcher and your pointer happens to end up right on top of one of the items in the Favorites view, it won’t be selected automatically. (Christoph Wolk, link)

The Kickoff Application Launcher widget now tries very hard to keep the first item of the search results view selected — at least until the point where you focus the list and start navigating to another item. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Discover now uses more user-friendly language when it’s being used to find apps that can open a certain file type. (Taras Oleksy, link)

You’re now far less likely to accidentally raise an unintended app when a notification happens to appear right underneath something you’re dragging-and-dropping. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

KMenuEdit now lets you select multiple items at a time for faster deletion. (Alexander Wilms, link)

The QR code dialog invokable from the clipboard has been removed, and instead the QR code is shown inline in the widget. This makes it large enough to actually use and also reduces unnecessary code. (Fushan Wen, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.3

Fixed a rare case where KWin could crash when the system wakes from sleep. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Worked around a QML compiler bug in Qt that made the power and session buttons in the Application Launcher widget overlap with the tab bar if you resized its popup. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Plasma 6.5.4

Fixed a regression in menu sizing that got accidentally backported to Plasma 6.5.3. All should be well in 6.5.4, and some distros have backported the fix already. (Akseli Lahtinen and Nate Graham, link)

Fixed a Plasma 6 regression that broke the ability to activate the System Tray’s expanded items popup with a keyboard shortcut. (Mikhail Sidorenko, link)

Fixed a regression caused by a Qt change that broke the clipboard’s Actions menu from being able to appear when the configuration dialog wasn’t open. (Fushan Wen, link)

Fixed a bug that could make the Plasma panel’s custom size chooser appear on the wrong screen. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a bug that could make the clipboard contents get sent many times when it’s being set programmatically in a portal-using app. (David Redondo, link)

Fixed a memory leak in Plasma’s desktop. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a memory leak in the clipboard Actions menu. (Fushan Wen, link)

KWin’s zoom effect now saves its current zoom level shortly after you change it, rather than at logout. This prevents a situation where the system is inappropriately zoomed in (or not zoomed in) after a KWin crash or power loss. (Ritchie Frodomar, link)

Fixed a bug that made the optional Textual List representation of multiple windows in the Task Manager widget fail to get focus when using medium focus stealing prevention. (David Redondo, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

Worked around a bug in some XWayland-using games that made it impossible to type text into certain popups. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Clearing KRunner’s search history now takes effect immediately, rather than only after KRunner was restarted. (Nate Graham, link)

With a very narrow display and a high scale factor, the buttons on the login, lock, and logout screens can no longer get cut off; now they wrap onto the next line. (Nate Graham, link)

Frameworks 6.21

Fixed a bug that could confuse KWallet — when being used as a Secret Service proxy for KeePassXC — into becoming convinced that it needed to create a new wallet. (Marco Martin, link)

Fixed two memory leaks affecting QML-based System Settings pages. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1 and link 2)

Other bug information of note:

4 very high priority Plasma bugs (Same as last week). Current list of bugs
34 15-minute Plasma bugs (Up from 31 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.5.3

Apps that use the Keyboard Shortcuts Portal to set shortcuts can now remove them in the same way. (David Redondo, link)

You can now use Spectacle’s Active Window mode to take a screenshot of WINE windows. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

Made a major improvement to the smoothness of animations throughout Plasma and KWin for people using screens with a refresh rate higher than 60 Hz! (David Edmundson, link)

Reduced the amount of unnecessary work KWin does during its compositing pipeline. (Xaver Hugl, link)

When you delete a whole category’s worth of shortcuts on System Settings’ Shortcuts page, all the shortcuts get grayed out and cease to be interactive, and a warning message tells you they’ll soon be deleted and gives you a chance to undo that before it happens. (Nate Graham, link)

Frameworks 6.21

KConfig now parses config files in a stream rather than opening them all at once, which allows it to notice early when a file is corrupted or improperly formatted. This prevents freezes in several places. (Méven Car, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

When using the Systemd integration functionality (which is on by default if Systemd is present), programs will no longer fail to launch while there are any environment variables beginning with a digit, as this is something Systemd doesn’t support. (Christoph Cullmann, link)

How You Can Help

Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. Believe it or not, we’ve already hit out our €75k stretch goal and are €5k towards the final one. I’m just in awe of the generosity of the KDE community and userbase. Thank you all for helping KDE to grow and prosper!

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.