Nate Graham on KDE Blogs

This Week in Plasma: Bi-Directional RDP Clipboard Sync

Nate Graham and John Veness — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week was full of user interface improvements and performance enhancements, and we snuck in a few features as well:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

Remote desktop sessions now offer a fully shared clipboard, rather than only sending the server’s clipboard to the client. (Nick Haghiri, krdp MR #213)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8

Events shown in the Digital Clock widget now display their descriptions inline, rather than in a hover tooltip. (Francesco Fortunelli, KDE Bugzilla #429700)

The scrolling speed sliders on System Settings’ Mouse and Touchpad pages are now accompanied by spinboxes that permit fine-tuning their speeds. (Wladimir Leuschner, KDE Bugzilla #477745)

Discover now shows all of the external links that apps can set in their metadata. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #522213)

Interactive UI elements on the logout screen are now only shown on the active monitor, mirroring the same thing on the lock and login screens. And the whole thing now fades in and out faster, too. (Ramil Nurmanov, and Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #431382 and kwin MR #9711)

The wallpaper chooser UI that’s visible in System Settings and the desktop configuration window now loads in a smoother and less glitchy-looking way. (Artem Grinev, plasma-workspace MR #6892)

The Power & Battery widget’s “Manually Block Sleep and Screen Locking” switch is now vertically aligned to its icon. See, KDE really does care about margins and alignment! 😁 (Angel Parra, powerdevil MR #662)

New

Old

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

The Power & Battery widget’s tooltip no longer talks about scrolling to change the power mode on systems without either of the power-profiles-daemon or tuned-ppd systems installed and working. (Nate Graham, powerdevil MR #663)

Plasma 6.7.5

Fixed a somewhat common way that Discover could crash on systems using the RPM-OSTree architecture, such as Fedora Kinoite. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, discover MR #1385)

If the fwupd system service is broken or masked using systemd, the rest of Discover still works as expected. (Tobias Fella, discover MR #1373)

When the Task Manager widget is used with a right-to-left language or its tasks are configured to appear “to the left”, the tasks now move to the expected location when manually rearranged by dragging. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #504898)

Custom accent colors defined within wallpapers are once again honored. (Zhora Zmeykin, KDE Bugzilla #514656)

Plasma 6.8

Fixed a case where the remote desktop server could crash when closing a connection. (Wengsheng Tang, krdp MR #189)

Resizing an aspect-ratio-locked window no longer sometimes makes it disappear! (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #479547)

The OSD displayed when muting or unmuting microphones using the Microphone Indicator widget now shows the correct icon. (Undef Fox, KDE Bugzilla #472107)

Apps packaged as Flatpaks or using Nix now get pinned to the Task Manager widget in a more robust way, so they’re less likely to get broken in the future if the underlying locations of their .desktop files change. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #505066)

The Emoji Selector window now uses the same consistent order for the gendered variants of all emojis, not just some of them. (Tobias Ozór, plasma-desktop MR #3939)

New

Old

The pointer now looks even sharper at absurdly enormous sizes when you shake it for ages and ages. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #9176)

Right-clicking twice on the same pixel of the desktop without moving the pointer no longer shows the wrong context menu the second time. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #504765)

Frameworks 6.30

Fixed a bug that could make KDE Connect consume 100% of a whole CPU core. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #517743)

Very large images on the clipboard no longer sometimes fail to paste successfully. (Zhora Zmeykin, KDE Bugzilla #519651)

Various dialogs throughout KDE software once again properly offer the opportunity to open executable text and script files in a text editor app, working around an upstream change in shared-mime-data which had broken this. (Méven Car, KDE Bugzilla #522948)

Kup 0.11.0

Kup’s notification about backup progress no longer erroneously tells you that the backup destination is on your phone that’s paired with KDE Connect. (Harald Sitter, KDE Bugzilla #518494)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.6.7

Added support for monitoring GPU usage for Intel A380 GPUs. (Takahiro Hashimoto, KDE Bugzilla #517334)

Pasting very large PNG images no longer sometimes causes some lagging and stuttering. (Zhora Zmeykin, plasma-workspace MR #6874)

Plasma 6.7.5

KWin now supports more than one wl_data_device, which opens the door to improved drag-and-drop support in Firefox. (Martin Stransky, KDE Bugzilla #521494)

Spectacle is now slightly faster at taking screenshots on vertically flipped screens. (Zhora Zmeykin, kwin MR #9752)

Plasma 6.8

The new kscreenctl tool now supports setting custom CVT timings/modelines. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #517654)

Frameworks 6.30

Reduced the number of times the common Kirigami.Icon component needs to read from the disk while looking for fallback icons. (Jakob Petsovits, kirigami MR #2139)

The Baloo file indexer now correctly ignores Btrfs snapshots that happen to be stored in your home directory, instead of pointlessly trying to index them. (Hadi Chokr, baloo MR #295)

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: UI Improvements Galore

Nate Graham and John Veness — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week we merged a number of features and UI changes that focus on user-friendliness — in addition to a nice crop of bug-fixes and performance improvements:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

If you try to print using a printer that’s unavailable, Plasma now helpfully notifies you of this instead of just doing nothing. (Mike Noe, KDE Bugzilla #362143)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8

Task Manager thumbnails now feature nicer padding around the labels near the top. (Michal Malinowski, plasma-desktop MR #3916)

When creating a new user account, the restrictions around which characters are allowed for the username of the new account are now clearly indicated via warning messages if you try to use invalid ones. (Mradul Pal, KDE Bugzilla #521545)

Kup 0.11.0

Kup now offers an improved set of default exclusions, with a simplified way of toggling them on or off. This should result in much less data being backed up that doesn’t actually need to be backed up — like cache files, state files, Btrfs snapshots, and more. (Bharadwaj Raju, kup MR #52)

This settings page is still a bit old and crusty. A visual refresh is also planned, JFYI!

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

If the xdg-desktop-portal-kde process crashes while it’s being used to allow an app to control the pointer and keyboard, control now instantly returns to you rather than getting stuck until the system is restarted. (Marcus Renheim, KDE Bugzilla #523515)

Using a panel’s “Floating Applets” feature no longer breaks the ability to drag files onto Task Manager representations of grouped tasks. (Antonio Rojas, KDE Bugzilla #510643)

The Task Manager widget no longer lays out items incorrectly when you rearrange them while the widget is using right-to-left mode. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #504898)

The “Identify Displays” feature no longer shows weird hexadecimal numbers in the labels for some screens. (David Wild and Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #523181 and kwin MR #9655)

Plasma 6.7.4

Fixed a UI glitch in the Disk Quota widget. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #523618)

Plasma 6.7.5

Syncing your settings to Plasma Login Manager now includes the ~/.config/plasma-localerc file, which makes the login screen respect your preferred language and time settings. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #516964)

Fixed or implemented support for the “highlight changed settings” feature for multiple System Settings pages. (Tobias Ozór, kwin MR #9675, KDE Bugzilla #521974, powerdevil MR #660, KDE Bugzilla #521978, and KDE Bugzilla #469914)

System Settings’ Spell Checking page no longer erroneously prompts you to save unsaved changes when you navigate away from it without having made any changes. (Antti Savolainen, KDE Bugzilla #521712)

The “OS Version” sensor in System Monitor widgets now works more reliably to handle KDE Linux and other non-traditional operating systems. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #523727)

Plasma 6.8

Fixed a bug in Plasma’s built-in remote desktop server that could present certain clients with a black screen instead of the expected content. (Shouvik Kar, krdp MR #222)

Switching between virtual desktops no longer makes the Window List Widget show the wrong window. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #523409)

The Applet::Index() property in Plasma scripting now actually returns the correct index. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #523675)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8

Plasma’s built-in remote desktop server now exhibits less latency and better performance when using less-than-ideal network connections. (Shouvik Kar, krdp MR #190)

Plasma now loads the clipboard pop-up on demand rather than at launch, which saves some memory. (Nicolas Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6899)

How you can help

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 Quarter in KDE Digital Sovereignty: Q2 2026

Nate Graham, Kevin Ottens, and John Veness — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:00:01 +0000

Welcome to the inaugural edition of This Quarter in KDE Digital Sovereignty!

This blog series will cover the work done throughout KDE’s software stack that’s funded by the investment KDE received earlier this year from Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency.

Commissioned work on a variety of projects has been done by KDE contributors working for KDE e.V. itself, as well as the Techpaladin Software and enioka Haute Couture companies.

This post will cover the work done in the second quarter of 2026. Let’s get into it!

Quality assurance and testing

The bulk of the work consisted of getting KDE’s house in order when it comes to automated testing — ensuring things that are working stay working, and providing early warnings about incompatibilities from updated dependencies.

The Sovereign Tech Agency’s investment in KDE included substantial funding for this work across KDE Plasma, KDE Linux, and KDE PIM, providing a strong technical foundation for all of the future funded work.

On the PIM side, we set up a dedicated test suite and an extensive set of newly-created tests for both IMAP and CalDAV/CardDAV resources. You can read more about it on Kevin Ottens’ blog. In any case, it helped uncover some issues which were promptly fixed (most notably recurrence exceptions are properly handled now), and identify dead code which has been cleaned up.

A similar process unfolded on the KDE Linux side, with a dedicated testing server managing a new openQA-based system that runs integration tests for many high-level cases relevant to Plasma in general and KDE Linux specifically. You can read more about it in this blog post by Thomas Duckworth. And it has also already borne fruit, including detecting an accidental regression in KWallet and protecting users from a KWin crash caused by a brief regression in Arch Linux’s gcc tooling.

IMAP4 revision 2

Beyond the QA, work also proceeded on the PIM side for the topic of improving support through the KDE PIM suite for IMAP4 revision 2. This led us to add support for more IMAP4 extensions in our stack like BINARY, LIST-EXTENDED, or LIST-STATUS. We also completed support for CONDSTORE and QRESYNC. Altogether, it allowed us to speed up IMAP resource syncing while using less network bandwidth — sometimes in a fairly drastic way, lowering the sync of a given mailbox to a single server round trip in the best cases!

We had more good news on this front too. It turned out to be less work than expected, as our IMAP implementation is in a fairly good shape! It will free some time to go further on the QA and testing side.

Automatic account configuration

Additional PIM topics included initial work to build a system for automatically discovering and setting up resources based on nothing more than an email address and password. We already have partial support for this kind of magic in KMail, but it doesn’t go beyond configuring email; that will change soon!

For this work, we’re preparing a new library which will implement the relevant draft RFC. The API is mostly in place, although we keep improving it. We’re now at the stage where we can plug this new implementation into KMail, and later on integrate the whole feature set via System Settings’ Online Accounts page. It will be nice when you just give an email and password there, to automatically see all your PIM apps automatically configured: mail, calendar, and identity.

WebDAV push notifications

The latest work started on the PIM side is about supporting push notifications for DAV calendars. This is based on a draft specification proposed by the DAVx⁵ folks. We’re currently mostly in the design phase, even though some adjustments to KDAV are already being made.

Ultimately this should lead to more targeted syncing when something changes on the server, reducing the network bandwidth requirements. It will also make your calendars sync with the server almost immediately instead of waiting for the next poll interval.

On the Plasma side, work also began to overhaul the way network shares are handled throughout KDE. So far the work has concentrated on beefing up KDE’s FUSE-based network share mounting in a variety of ways.

Perhaps the most notable way being explored is to create the FUSE mount in response to a request to access a file on a network location even if the user has not already accessed it from Dolphin. This work is in progress.

Work is also in progress to mount these FUSE mounts at a standardized and predictable path, and to surface them in the standard Places panel for ease of access.

Data integrity

To improve data integrity throughout KDE, we created a new service for interfacing with Btrfs snapshots. This will form the backbone of various user interfaces integrated throughout KDE software (starting with Dolphin) to offer users the possibility to restore earlier versions of their files from snapshots, and use those snapshots for traditional backup systems.

In addition, we put some work into improving KDE’s Kup backup system, in the form of UI improvements for determining what gets included in backups, and modernizing the user interface of its Plasma widget.

Configuration management

Work began on an overhaul of KDE’s configuration management infrastructure in the form of porting software to use the more modern KConfigXT system. This system uses a declarative syntax with defined schemas, allowing KDE software’s available configuration options and default settings to be knowable without having to read the source code.

This effort will eventually open up the possibility of writing a management app similar to GNOME’s DConf Editor tool that can offer administrators the ability to graphically visualize and change configuration options.

Looking forward

So it was a busy quarter of shoring up some of the foundations in KDE to lay the groundwork for future efforts. We’re very grateful for the Sovereign Tech Agency’s investment in KDE that made this possible! Once the QA efforts wind down, we’ll be in a great position to start working on the more user-facing elements of the investment.

This Month in KDE Linux: July 2026

Nate Graham and John Veness — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to the inaugural edition of This Month in KDE Linux hosted on blogs.kde.org!

Previously, these posts lived on Nate Graham’s personal blog. But KDE Linux is growing up and becoming a more important part of KDE, larger than its individual contributors! So it’s time to move the public communication to KDE infrastructure, and that’s where you’ll be able to read these posts going forward.

Without further ado, here’s how KDE Linux evolved in July:

QA & testing

This month, Thomas Duckworth and Bhushan Shah integrated the next-gen QA system they’ve been building!

It’s now testing tons of conditions to make sure KDE Linux continues to work as expected, and it also acts as a full-stack integration test suite. To illustrate the utility of such a thing, it’s already identified and protected users from two significant issues:

A login-breaking KWin crash caused by a regression in gcc from Arch Linux (already fixed).
A regression in automatically unlocking your wallet at login (also already fixed).

These tricky problems could only have been caught by the kind of full-stack integration test suite that KDE Linux has now.

If you’re interested in the details, Thomas Duckworth’s blog post on how the system works is worth a read. Thanks very much to Thomas and Bhushan for building this lovely system!

Security

Hadi Chokr implemented some kernel-hardening tweaks we learned about from the SecureBlue project that were relevant to KDE Linux and wouldn’t noticeably burden users.

Efficiency & performance

Nate Graham removed the kernel modules for various hardware watchdogs that aren’t relevant for desktop use, which slightly reduces CPU usage and improves boot times.

Thomas Duckworth switched the CUPS printing system to use socket activation, which allows its services to only run when needed.

Software support package downloader + support for Java and DOS apps

Hadi Chokr implemented a major improvement to the “Package Compatibility Helper” tool that now allows it to — with the user’s consent — download software from Flathub to handle files that the user tries to open, but that nothing on the system can currently open.

Hadi then made this work for Java apps; the first time you try to launch one, the tool will ask you if you want to download a Java Runtime Environment (JRE). If you approve, it will do so and then launch the app using the JRE:

After that, Hadi implemented support for DOS apps; trying to launch one will offer up DOSBox. Now you can have that authentic 1993 Doom experience:

This system can be extended to support even more things in the future! And it’s been written in a generic enough way that it would be useful for any other image-based OS using Flatpak, as well.

Bugs fixed

Philip Grant fixed the mechanism that ensures that existing KDE Linux systems have the same Flatpaks installed as are pre-loaded on new systems, as it had various bugs that prevented it from working properly.

David Fundament fixed the script that disables USB auto-suspend for input devices so that it works with devices lacking a product name.

WenChao Zhang restored the esp4 and esp6 kernel modules that had been removed to mitigate the “DirtyFrag” vulnerability. The vulnerability has been fixed now, and missing those modules had broken IPsec VPNs, so they’re back now.

Hadi Chokr made WWAN modems work out of the box.

Documentation

Thomas Duckworth documented how to use and extend the new QA system.

Nate Graham documented how to make the Fcitx 5 input method (for CJKV input) work with apps still using the XWayland compatibility layer.

Hadi Chokr documented how to set up bootloader menus so you can choose between booting KDE Linux or another OS on the same computer. However, setting up such a system is left as a manual exercise for the reader, as currently the KDE Linux installer does not yet formally support complex disk setups. This will come later.

Grab bag

Prajna Sariputra pre-installed vulkan-virtio, improving performance in VMs whose graphics drivers support Vulkan.

Thomas Duckworth made the set-up-systemd-extension and toggle-developer-mode tools only prompt for authentication once.

Nate Graham removed the “Push Services” library and System Settings page, because it’s not mature enough for shipping yet.

How you can help

KDE Linux is making steady progress towards its Beta milestone, and is now 83% of the way there.

There’s lots to do! If you’re a fan of the project, please help out; there are many ways:

User support: help support people on discuss.kde.org using KDE Linux.
Issue reporting: install KDE Linux and report issues.
Documentation: improve the docs by submitting merge requests.
Flatpak: fix packaging or code issues in Flatpak-packaged apps.
OS development: help build KDE Linux! There’s plenty to do.

This Week in Plasma: Emoji Resizing

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

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

…but before we start, here’s a quick reminder that we’ve entered the last week to submit your proposal for the next KDE Goals cycle! If you’re not ready to champion a goal, you can still get involved by joining one of the existing proposals as a contributor or supporter.

And now, without further ado…

In addition to the headliner feature and expected UI improvements and bug fixes, this week features some promising technical and performance improvements. Have a look:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

You can now make the emojis in the Emoji Selector window bigger or smaller. (Jason Uithol, plasma-desktop MR #3878)

On System Settings’ Display Configuration page, you can now move screens pixel-by-pixel using the arrow keys while in layout editing mode. (Antti Savolainen, kscreen MR #476)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7.4

The Emoji Selector window is now always tall enough to accommodate its sidebar without scrolling. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #523090)

Spectacle now detects QR codes in screenshots that you take in such a manner that the main UI is never shown; if you click “Annotate” from the notification about it, the QR code will be detected there. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #521097)

Plasma 6.8

In Spectacle’s settings window, image quality controls are now only available for image types whose quality level is adjustable. (Zhora Zmeykin, spectacle MR #568)

Clarified the instructions on System Settings’s Remote Desktop page a little bit. (Nate Graham, krdp MR #224 and krdp MR #225)

Kup 0.11.0

Modernized the UI for the Kup backup system’s System Tray widget, so now it matches other Plasma widgets that can similarly show multiple items, each with their own actions. (Bharadwaj Raju and Tomáš Hnyk, kup MR #53 and kup MR #54)

New

Old

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Fixed a case where the ksystemstats background service could crash seemingly randomly. (Méven Car, KDE Bugzilla #523562)

Fixed a recent regression that made blank document icons appear in the notification history view. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #522846)

Fixed a bug that could make extremely long words in Plasma tooltips overflow rather than wrapping. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #523614)

Fixed a bug that made third-party widgets fail to inhibit power management more than once. (Vincent de Robert, KDE Bugzilla #523605)

Plasma 6.7.4

Fixed a visual glitch where the highlight area for expanded list items in various System Tray widgets would sometimes be too small to fit its contents. (Bharadwaj Raju, KDE Bugzilla #506295)

Plasma 6.8

Fixed an issue that could sometimes corrupt very large screenshots taken in Spectacle when they were pasted elsewhere. (Cezar Craciunoiu, spectacle MR #566)

Frameworks 6.29

Opening various windows and dialogs using Kirigami components no longer makes the content scroll into view for no particularly good reason. (Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano, KDE Bugzilla #515811)

ddcutil 2.2.8

Fixed multiple issues that could make the powerdevil background process freeze or crash. (Sanford Rockowitz, ddcutil issue #581 and ddcutil issue #587)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8

Significantly improved performance with external GPUs. Read more about this on Xaver’s blog! (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #7101)

You can now change the size (and effective resolution) of virtual screens created for screencasting, rather than them being fixed to a resolution of 1920 × 1080 pixels. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #512620)

Panel floating-ness can now be changed using Plasma desktop scripting. (Ramil Nurmanov, KDE Bugzilla #521549)

KWin now recognizes the “Pick up phone” and “Hang up phone” keys on some keyboards, allowing them to be used in keyboard shortcuts to trigger actions. (Méven Car, kwin MR #7892)

Frameworks 6.29

Fixed a performance issue that could make Plasma freeze when it sent a notification with a lot of emojis in it. (Devin Lin, KDE Bugzilla #508070)

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: Auto-Lock and Unlock for Remote Desktop Sessions

Nate Graham, John Veness, and Salman Farooq — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week saw a bunch of work on some core infrastructure components, like the RDP server, login greeter, and screen configuration tooling. That’s in addition to lots of other good work, too:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

You can now configure Plasma’s built-in remote desktop server to automatically lock the session after the last connected RDP client disconnects. (Nick Haghiri, krdp MR #211)

Plasma Login Manager now remembers the last-used session for each user. (Jin Liu and Oliver Beard, plasma-login-manager MR #176 and libplasma MR #1557)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8

Discover’s transaction progress view now shows items in groups, with the ones currently in progress in a group at the top. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, discover MR #1219)

On multi-screen setups, the existing Meta + 1-9 shortcuts for jumping straight to a task now target the panel on the screen you’re actively using, rather than always going to the primary monitor’s panel. This matches the behavior added to last week’s new task-switching shortcuts. (Salman Farooq, plasma-desktop MR #3884 and plasma-workspace MR #6848)

You can now find languages in Plasma Setup by searching for their locale code, localized name, or English name. (Tiziano Gaia, plasma-setup MR #109)

Frameworks 6.29

Further improved the visual fidelity of small icons drawn with the Kirigami.Icon component. (Méven Car, kirigami MR #2127)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Fixed an issue that made KWin crash on login for newer NVIDIA GPUs using the latest NVIDIA drivers in conjunction with various color management features. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #523287)

Restored the ability to play full-screen video in Chromium-based browsers on a virtual screen, such as those used when screen recording. (Xaver Hugl, Bugzilla #523353)

Fixed an issue that could make Plasma freeze and then take down apps as well after you switched activities with unusual values in your Plasma config file. (Shouvik Kar, KDE Bugzilla #522039)

Fixed two visual glitches affecting the Digital Clock widget: one that made the layout overflow on a panel right after turning on the “always show seconds” setting, and another one that made the time zone label fail to use the systemwide font family. (Hunter White and Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #523010 and KDE Bugzilla #523164)

When an image used in a slideshow in the Media Frame widget is changed on disk, the widget now notices it properly, rather than replacing it with a blank frame. (David Wild, KDE Bugzila #521538)

Plasma 6.7.4

Fixed a weird bug that could break Plasma Login Manager after you unplugged a screen and plugged it back in while on the login screen. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bugzilla #523313)

Fixed a bug that could make KWin crash on login on various laptops. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9632)

Fixed a case where System Settings could crash when Fanatec racing pedals were plugged in. (Sebastian Sauer, KDE Bugzilla #522886)

Restored the ability to change the wallpaper and apply Plasma settings to Plasma Login Manager for users who upgraded from Plasma 6.6. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #517081)

Frameworks 6.29

Fixed a surprisingly common yet random-seeming way that Plasma could crash. (Shouvik Kar, KDE Bugzilla #519614)

QML-based KDE apps once again remember whether they were maximized or not across launches. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #522205)

Worked around a Qt bug that made some keyboard shortcuts in Kirigami-based apps not get assigned when using the app in certain languages other than English. (Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano, kirigami MR #2124)

Icons drawn by the Kirigami.Icon component now use the correct aspect ratio for portrait-orientation images when they’re being rounded to standard icon sizes. (Méven Car, kirigami MR #2126)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8

We have created a new kscreenctl tool, intended as a future replacement for the old kscreen-doctor tool. It includes more features, more robustness, and a more conventional usage method. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kscreen MR #487)

kscreenctl --help in a terminal window" src="https://blogs.kde.org/2026/07/25/this-week-in-plasma-auto-lock-and-unlock-for-remote-desktop-sessions/kscreenctl.webp" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" />

Discover is now faster to load icons for Flatpak apps. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, discover MR #1366)

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: Shadows for Steam and Discord

Nate Graham and John Veness — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week the bug-fixing spree of the past few weeks wound down as feature work and user interface polishing moved into the foreground. So let’s start out with something pretty darn user-visible:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

KWin now automatically applies a shadow, outline, and corner rounding effect to some client-side-decorated windows that lack these — such as Steam and Discord windows. Read more about this on Vlad’s blog! (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #9147, kwin MR #9566, breeze MR #612, and kdecoration MR #93)

You can now assign processes to specific CPUs or groups of CPUs in System Monitor, known as setting CPU affinity. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #429151)

The Task Manager widget now has global shortcuts for re-arranging tasks and switching between them. (Salman Farooq, plasma-desktop MR #3819)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7.4

Apps using the global shortcuts portal are now allowed to rename their shortcuts by requesting to re-register them. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #523063)

Plasma 6.8

System Settings’ Window Behavior page has been ported to QML and modernized a bit in the process, bringing it up to par with most other pages in System Settings. (Tobias Ozór, kwin MR #9370)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

System Settings’ Effects page now behaves properly for KWin effects whose default values have been overridden at the distribution level. (Nicolas Fella, kwin MR #8112)

Plasma 6.7.3

Fixed a recent regression that made the ksystemstats process sometimes crash when the system woke from sleep. (Iyán Méndez Veiga, KDE Bugzilla #521353)

Fixed a recent regression that caused lag and stuttering on certain websites using hardware-accelerated rendering for systems using certain GPUs. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #521742)

Fixed a weird issue that made the system stop sleeping according to the normal schedule if you interrupted certain monitors while they were right in the middle of shutting down. (Ameen Al-Asady, KDE Bugzilla #523001)

Plasma 6.7.4

Fixed a somewhat common way that Discover could crash while installing updates. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Bugzilla #522255)

The bandwidth usage reported by Plasma’s remote desktop server is now accurate. (Liu Jie, krdp MR #216)

Fixed a layout glitch on System Settings’ Pointers page that prevented some pointer size options from being fully visible when using screen scaling. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #521187)

Fixed two layout glitches in Discover when using the app with multiple backends and looking at large items on the Installed page. (Nate Graham, discover MR #1357 and discover MR #1358)

The “Typing on the desktop activates KRunner” setting is now fully respected for Folder View widgets placed on the desktop, in addition to the embedded Folder View that is the desktop. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #523053)

Plasma 6.8

Fixed some positioning and theme compatibility issues with drop-down menus in Plasma and its widgets. (Filip Fila, libplasma MR #1546)

Notable in performance & technical

Frameworks 6.29

Reduced Plasma’s memory usage a little bit. (Nicolas Fella, ksvg MR #113 and kguiaddons MR #224)

KDE Gear 26.12

System Settings’ Connection Preferences page has been removed. Its settings were extremely esoteric and they applied to almost nothing these days, so the page was mostly just cluttering the place up. (Tobias Fella, kio-extras MR #533)

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: Audio Recording in Spectacle

Nate Graham and John Veness — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week was busy! We’ve got some great new features to share, improved theming compatibility, UI improvements, bug fixes… and lots more! This is one of those weeks with a bit of something for everyone — even people who are picky about software dependencies. Take a look:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

Spectacle now gives you the option to record audio during screen recordings! It can grab audio from the microphone, audio that the system is outputting, or both. (Khudoberdi Abdujalilov, KDE Bugzilla #474798)

System Monitor can now measure VRAM usage as a percentage of the total, just like it can for regular RAM. (Beck Thompson, ksystemstats MR #135)

The 13-month Ethiopian calendar joins the growing ranks of supported alternate calendars! (Eyobed Awel, kdeplasma-addons MR #1079)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.6.6

Improved the responsiveness of the brightness slider in the Brightness & Color widget. (Marco Martin, powerdevil MR #650)

Plasma 6.7.3

The Vietnamese lunar calendar now displays its text in Vietnamese even if your system language is set to something else, which is more consistent with other alternate calendars. (Trần Nam Tuấn, KDE Bugzilla #521787)

The feature to show alternative characters when you press and hold a key on the keyboard now triggers after 600 milliseconds of holding, rather than 200. This should make it much harder to accidentally activate. (Kristen McWilliam, plasma-keyboard MR #157)

You can now interact with the Overview and Custom Tiling overlays using a drawing tablet stylus in a Wayland session. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #468396 and KDE Bugzilla #522677)

Plasma 6.8

Comboboxes in Plasma now use the active Plasma theme to style their popups, rather than using a hardcoded Breeze-style appearance. And their menu highlights no longer animate in and out, either, which matches the appearance everywhere else. (Filip Fila, libplasma MR #1547 and libplasma MR #1550)

System Settings’ Remote Desktop page no longer looks somewhere between “very awkward” and “broken” with a small and narrow window size, like on a phone. (Nick Haghiri, krdp MR #208)

System Settings’ “Report a Bug in the Current Page” feature now works for pages that didn’t come from KDE but still list a bug reporting URL. (Antti Savolainen, systemsettings MR #412)

Auto-login now works in Plasma Login Manager on operating systems with older versions of systemd, like KDE neon. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #522006)

Brightness on external monitors now changes more quickly after you adjust the brightness slider in the Brightness & Color widget. (Kylie CT, KDE Bugzilla #498913)

Frameworks 6.29

When using the default qqc2-desktop-style system (as opposed to when testing the upcoming Union system), list and grid view highlights in QML-based KDE software now respect the visual styling of the active app style, rather than having a hardcoded Breeze-style appearance. In addition, password fields no longer change in height for certain fonts when you type the first character into them. (Evgeniy Harchenko, qqc2-desktop-style MR #521 and qqc2-desktop-style MR #524)

The Breeze icon theme now includes an icon for Android app bundle files. (Tobias Zwick, KDE Bugzilla #508430)

The large fancy Kirigami tab bars seen in QML-based KDE software now switch the active tab when you scroll over them or press one of the standard tab-switching keyboard shortcuts — just like tab bars in QtWidgets-based apps do. (Tobias Ozór, kirigami MR #2123)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.6

The Choose Application window no longer percent-encodes some characters in filenames, which looked pretty ugly. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #521748)

The Media Frame widget no longer displays every other image in a somewhat sharpened and crunchy manner. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #521534)

Plasma 6.7.3

Fixed a recent regression that broke closing windows in the Overview overlay by middle-clicking them. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #522015)

Fixed a few remaining minor layout regressions in the Color Picker widget, so now it should always have the same size as it did in Plasma 6.6. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #522377)

Fixed a recent regression in an X11 session that made icons of all running Flatpak apps appear unnecessarily in the System Tray. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #522864)

Plasma no longer crashes if you disable the Calendar Events plugin in one Digital Clock widget when there are more than one of them with that plugin enabled. (Shouvik Kar, KDE Bugzilla #520465)

When the system is configured to automatically switch global themes at certain times of day, this switchover now takes place as expected even if the computer happened to be turned off when the transition would have taken place. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #511740)

Plasma 6.8

Fixed a glitch related to scrolling in System Monitor’s Configure Columns popup, which is now a traditional window instead. (Arjen Hiemstra, KDE Bugzilla #517723)

In the Networks widget, connecting to a network you don’t have permission to edit no longer mistakenly makes all other available networks look connected. (Sergey Katunin, KDE Bugzilla #461028)

Frameworks 6.29

Fixed a subtle regression that prevented overriding settings set at the vendor/distro level (e.g. via a /etc/xdg/kwinrc file) that differed from Plasma’s own default settings. This affected Kubuntu and Fedora, which turned on Wobbly Windows and Plasma Keyboard, respectively. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #519481)

Typst documents once again show a fancy icon when using the Breeze icon theme, fixing an issue where this stopped happening after the official MIME type for Typst files was changed upstream of KDE. (Boris Jurcaga, breeze-icons MR #554)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.6.6

Using a udev rule to set the LIBINPUT_CALIBRATION_MATRIX property now works as expected in a Wayland session. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #521464)

Plasma 6.8

Spectacle no longer requires the fairly chunky OpenCV software library; we found a way to implement an adequately-performant blur effect without it. (Noah Davis, spectacle MR #561 and kquickimageeditor MR #53)

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: Better Animations

Nate Graham and John Veness — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week Plasma 6.7 received a few more stabilization bug-fixes while attention turned towards the upcoming 6.8 release. Some exciting changes are in progress, and a few have already merged, including highly visible improvements to some common animations.

Check it out!

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

Updated the Emoji Selector app to version 17 of the Unicode emoji standard, giving you access to derpy new emojis like “🫪️”. (Jens Jerosch, plasma-desktop MR #3849)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7.2

Moved the global “Move Mouse to Focus” and “Move Mouse to Center” actions out of the Zoom effect, so they still work even if you’ve globally disabled the Zoom effect. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #522070)

Plasma 6.7.3

Made KRunner’s Bookmarks search provider return results for 2-character queries (so it will match “Qt”, for example), and use fewer system resources. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6764)

The Clipboard widget’s Actions Configuration page now uses better internal margins for the content. (Levi Leal, plasma-workspace MR #6779)

After

Before

Plasma 6.8

The “Bouncing app icon” launch feedback style now uses a more visually pleasing animation with a better physics model, a more appropriate easing curve, and a higher frame-rate. (The Entropyist, kwin MR #9487)

The new sliding animation for notifications now uses a more natural easing curve, so it looks even better than it already did! (Thomas Duckworth, KDE Bugzilla #522276)

There’s no longer a secret keyboard shortcut (previously Meta+Ctrl+x) that turns on clipboard actions. This was easy to press by accident, and would then make weird popups appear when you copied URLs. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6773)

The Digital Clock widget now requests “tabular numerals”, which are monospaced digits supported by some fonts. The use of these numerals prevents the clock from changing its width as time passed in a few edge cases where the existing code to prevent that wasn’t good enough. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-workspace MR #6797)

Discover’s old “CD and DVD” category is now named “Disc Burning”, because that’s what apps expect it to be, which explains why it only contained disc burning apps. (Nate Graham, discover MR #1350)

After

Before

And before you ask: no, we couldn’t instead change the category to include all apps related to CDs and DVDs, because it’s a standard category governed by a FreeDesktop spec, and to do that, we’d need a new one.

Info Center’s Memory page now shows a busy indicator if it takes more than a moment to load. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kinfocenter MR #305)

You can now more easily find the System Settings page responsible for the “press and hold a key to see alternative characters” popup, to turn it on or off or change the delay before it appears. (Kristen McWilliam, plasma-keyboard MR #154)

The DrKonqi crash reporting wizard now tells you when it’s safe to close the window. (Antti Savolainen, drkonqi MR #397)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.6

Hardened the Task Manager widget against maliciously-crafted .desktop files for apps. (David Edmundson, plasma-workspace MR #6817)

Hardened the ksystemstats_intel_helper process against path traversal attacks. (Matthias Gerstner, ksystemstats MR #141)

Plasma 6.7.2

Fixed a recent regression that made certain screens incorrectly notify about being disconnected and re-connected in a loop after they went to sleep. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #521826)

Fixed a recent regression that produced corrupted visuals on some rotated screens and with some older AMD GPUs. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #521878 and KDE Bugzilla #521764)

Fixed a recent regression that broke the ability to drag desktop files and folders between screens. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #521713)

Fixed a recent regression that made SDR content look a bit de-saturated for some screens while in HDR mode. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #521759)

Fixed a recent regression that made certain ICC profiles show the wrong colors. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #522301)

Fixed a recent regression that made KWin lag and hang when playing certain poorly-optimized games via Proton. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #522005)

The implementation of the new “press and hold for alternative characters” feature now prioritizes compatibility for apps, fixing a massive number of bugs. (Kristen McWilliam, plasma-keyboard MR #152)

The new Vietnamese calendar now shows the correct dates. (Trần Nam Tuấn, KDE Bugzilla #522099)

The new feature to show how much earlier or later a time zone is than your current one now correctly calculates the value for time zones with a half-hour offset that are earlier than your local time zone. Time is hard. (Michael Kohl, KDE Bugzilla #522037)

Forcing the use of the software pointer no longer makes it disappear when a window pushes a panel in “Dodge Windows” mode into its hidden state. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #521953)

The Mouse page in System Settings no longer shows layout glitches in X11. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #521992)

Text on the Networks widget’s Details tab can no longer visually overflow when it’s really long. (Manuel Alcaraz, KDE Bugzilla #522333)

Plasma 6.7.3

The “Kameleon” system service is now disabled by default, which prevents it from applying a color to your keyboard’s backlit keys even if the feature to apply colors to RGB keyboard backlighting is disabled. The context here is that we added support for the Steam Machine’s LED strip, and this also made it work for many keyboards, but exposed a pre-existing bug. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bugzilla #521793)

Spectacle no longer includes the tooltip showing image dimensions in the final screenshot if you accept a rectangular region by double-clicking it. (Noah Davis, KDE Bugzilla #513715)

Plasma 6.8

Fixed the most common crash in Plasma, which could happen once in a while when using multiple screens. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #500044)

Minimizing the window of an RDP client no longer stops the video stream. (Shouvik Kar, KDE Bugzilla #497765)

Frameworks 6.28

XWayland-using apps no longer start to behave in a couple of weird and quirky ways after XWayland itself crashes and restarts. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwindowsystem MR #220)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.7.3

Fixed a recent performance regression that increased KWin’s CPU usage on some Intel systems using atomic mode-setting. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #522075)

Plasma 6.8

Implemented support for version 1.6 of the Emulated Input system. (David Edmundson, kwin MR #9112)

KWin now internally only uses OpenGL ES, which ensures that it will always be working since everyone will be using it — at least until Vulkan support is farther along. OpenGL ES is necessary for some old GPUs and turns out to be sufficient for everything KWin needs anyway, so we don’t anticipate any downsides from this change. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9488)

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: Post-6.7 Bug-fixing

Nate Graham and John Veness — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week members of the core Plasma team spent almost all of their time in bug-fixing mode! As usual, people unleashed their real-world setups on the new Plasma release and found some issues we missed during the development process, and that nobody reported during the two beta releases. So we made it a priority to fix those issues!

Plasma 6.7.1 was released earlier this week with the first round of fixes, and 6.7.2 is scheduled for early next week with more.

A few new features and UI improvements started landing, too.

Check it out here:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

You can now set up wallpaper slideshows that don’t change automatically. Instead you can manually switch the wallpaper via the item in the desktop context menu or its global keyboard shortcut. (Fushan Wen, KDE Bugzilla #518669)

Added an Esperanto keyboard layout to Plasma’s virtual keyboard. (Daniel O’Neill, plasma-keyboard MR #148)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7.2

Improved text alignment in System Monitor’s Processes page while using the tree view. (Arjen Hiemstra, KDE Bugzilla #442095)

Plasma 6.8

Reduced the number of visual frames in the Menu Editor app. (Levi Leal, kmenuedit MR #59)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.6

Fixed an issue that could make KWin crash when some apps opened dialogs and popups in non-standard ways. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #9444)

Fixed a regression introduced by Qt 6.11 that made the word “Undefined” appear next to Places entries in the Kickoff Application Launcher widget. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #521799)

Fixed a visual glitch affecting users of Deskflow that could make a clone of the pointer inappropriately remain visible on the client machine. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #521486)

Plasma 6.7.1

Fixed a somewhat common case where KWin could crash on the lock screen when using an NVIDIA GPU. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #520842)

Fixed a recent regression that made KWin crash when using a DisplayLink monitor. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #520361)

Fixed an issue that could make screens plugged into a laptop with both an NVIDIA and an AMD GPU freeze. (Xaver Hugl and SungHwan Jung, KDE Bugzilla #521727)

Fixed a recent regression that broke certain shader-based KWin effects, including the popular “Burn My Windows” effects. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #521774)

Fixed a recent regression that broke color-related KWin effects like color blindness correction and screen color inversion. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #521737)

Plasma 6.7.2

Fixed the currently most common KWin crash, related to variable refresh rates with multi-monitor setups. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #521909)

Fixed a case where Info Center could crash when trying to display information about certain NVIDIA GPUs. (Harald Sitter, KDE Bugzilla #521295)

Fixed a recent regression that broke the RDP server when run using systemd. Sorry about that! (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #521776)

Fixed a recent regression that could sometimes make Chromium-based apps freeze if another window was forced into “Keep Above Others” mode. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #521687)

Plasma 6.8

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash after you ejected an audio CD from Dolphin or Audex. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #522051)

Flatpak 1.18.1

Fixed an issue that made a background service for Flatpak crash if you used the KDE desktop portal dialog to allow an app to update itself while the app was still running. (Sebastian Wick, flatpak issue #6686)

GTK 4.23.2

Made the process of selecting text to later paste it by middle-clicking more reliable in GTK 4 apps. (Vlad Zahorodnii, gtk MR #10006)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.7.2

Improved full-screen video playback performance in Chromium-based apps. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #521960)

Plasma 6.8

Turned on triple buffering by default for NVIDIA GPUs, because the bugs blocking this from working properly in the past have since been fixed. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9472)

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.

This Week in Plasma: 6.7 is Here!

Nate Graham and John Veness — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week we released Plasma 6.7, and the reviews are overwhelmingly positive so far!

But the team didn’t sit on its laurels; instead we spent the week fixing a few issues that snuck past our beta testers or that developers didn’t manage to fix in time for the final release. So far it’s looking like this was a pretty smooth release.

And in addition, features and UI improvements started to merge for Plasma 6.8! Check it all out:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

Monitors are now identified with color-coded number badges in all the places they’re configured, making it easier to identify which one is which especially when using two monitors from the same product line. (Ramil Nurmanov, kscreen MR #456 and kwin MR #9090)

Frameworks 6.28

KRunner-powered search fields can now convert between watt-hours, kilowatt-hours, and other similar energy units. (Levin Lhoest, kunitconversion MR #88)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7.1

There’s now a smooth blend effect when switching between global themes, just like there already was when switching between color schemes. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6199)

Plasma 6.8

Switched to the KDE-style color picker throughout QML-based KDE apps, instead of the one provided by Qt which doesn’t respect KDE color schemes. A few apps had already hardcoded the KDE one, but now it happens universally so all benefit from it. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #520987)

When moving a window by dragging it while the Meta key is held down, it is now brought in front of all other windows. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #520339)

Trying to delete a file on the desktop that you don’t have permission to delete now at least shows you an error message explaining what the problem is, instead of doing… nothing. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #515869)

Made the “Connect” button in the VPN connection dialog a lot more visually obvious. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-nm MR #600)

Added more symbols to the “press and hold a key to see related characters” feature of the Plasma virtual keyboard. (Jonas Harer, plasma-keyboard MR #133)

Frameworks 6.28

Fixed multiple sources of icons and thumbnails being blurry throughout Kirigami-based KDE software when using a fractional scale factor. (Marco Martin, kirigami MR #2116)

Improved the way the Kicker/Kickoff/etc. menus handle the case of multiple applications with the same name being installed. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #516802)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.6

Fixed an issue that could make KWin fail to start at login with some older GPUs and GPU drivers in certain circumstances. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #521333)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while switching wallpapers in a slideshow. (Fushan Wen, plasma-workspace MR #6753)

Fixed an issue in System Monitor that could make items get sorted the wrong way after changing the order or visibility of columns in the data table. (Arjen Hiemstra, KDE Bugzilla #518073)

Fixed a regression in the icon displayed by the Networks widget for VLAN networks. (Fabian Druschke, KDE Bugzilla #516709)

Plasma 6.7.1

Fixed one of the most common ways that Discover could crash on operating systems using the rpm-ostree packaging technology, such as Fedora Kinoite. (Timothée Ravier, KDE Bugzilla #519672)

Fixed a case where KWin could crash while logging into the system if an app asked for an invalid color format. (Shaun Ren, kwin MR #9382)

Fixed an issue that could break accented text entry for some keyboard layouts while the Plasma virtual keyboard was enabled. (Kristen McWilliam, KDE plasma-keyboard MR #126)

Fixed a regression that made some network details go missing from the Networks widget. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #521415)

Fixed a regression that made Task Manager badges displaying very large numbers of unread items visually overflow on very thin panels. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #521562)

Fixed a regression that made the Kickoff Application Launcher widget resize itself inappropriately while showing search results right after being added to a panel. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #521383)

Fixed a regression that made the Kickoff Application Launcher widget lose its hover effect for category list items, but only when using the non-default “Switch sidebar categories when hovering over them” setting. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=521558)

Fixed two issues with clipboard syncing in remote desktop use cases. (David Redondo, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #588 and xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #589)

Frameworks 6.28

Fixed a regression in Kirigami that made the header of the “Manage Panels and Desktops” window overlap with the content. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #521552)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.6.6

Fixed a significant memory leak that was found when using window rules to force window decorations on Firefox in CSD mode. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #518939)

Plasma 6.7.1

Turned off the game controller input plugin by default, as some issues were uncovered and it appears to need a bit more time in the metaphorical oven. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9424)

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: 6.7 is Very Close!

Nate Graham and John Veness — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week the Plasma team put the finishing touches on Plasma 6.7 with another big push on bug fixing. It’s looking really good for release next Tuesday!

As a result, some feature work and UI polishing started to trickle in for Plasma 6.8.

Check it out:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

Plasma Browser Integration now supports the Flatpak version of Microsoft Edge. (Conley Dawson, KDE Bugzilla #521109)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.6.6

Window actions that involve the mouse wheel no longer respect your “natural scrolling” preference; we reasoned that in this situation, up should always mean up and down should always mean down. (Vlad Zahorodnii and David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #442789)

Plasma 6.7

If you authorize an app to be able to remote-control the system without asking for permission first (for example, a remote desktop app), when it does so, now Plasma shows a notification that it’s happening. (David Redondo, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #571)

When navigating by using the number pad keys to move the pointer, pressing multiple keys now moves the pointer in a direction halfway between them. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #486520)

KRunner-powered searches now suppress results from the “Global Shortcuts” provider when there are better results from other ones, which makes the search results more relevant for common searches. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bugzilla #3710)

Changed the automatic day/night theme switcher to switch halfway between the start and end of dawn or dusk, rather than at the end. (Vlad Zahorodnii, Bugzilla #511973)

Added kde-shader-wallpaper to the list of allowed wallpaper plugins in Plasma Login Manager. (y4m y4m, plasma-login-manager MR #141)

Plasma 6.8

Improved Plasma’s ability to detect dark GTK 2 themes and apply a matching icon theme, which should substantially reduce cases of illegible icons in old GTK 2 apps when using a dark color theme. (Luan Oliveira, kde-gtk-config MR #144)

The top edges of non-maximized Breeze-themed windows now have as much extra draggable area as the bottom and side edges already do. (Sergey Katunin, KDE Bugzilla #504225)

Made the portal-based permission dialogs more consistent in their presentation and wording. (Nate Graham, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #575)

Frameworks 6.28

You can now use the Meta key on its own to trigger KWin’s Overview screen. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #518302)

Improved the alignment of thumbnail previews in open/save dialogs. (John Doe, frameworks-kio MR #2249)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.6

Fixed an issue that made KWin accidentally leak the CAP_SYS_NICE capability to child processes it launched, which would break the Bubblewrap sandboxing system when applied to those processes. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #521013)

Fixed a bug that could make Plasma crash when changing the monitor layout during the login process. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #510477)

Fixed an issue that could make the “Today” button on the Digital Clock widget’s calendar popup highlight the wrong day when in a time zone later than UTC and the local time was before midnight in UTC time. (Fushan Wen, KDE Bugzilla #521114)

The feature that lets apps screencast without asking permission no longer requires the screen setup to be identical to what it was when the permission was granted. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #519122)

SVG-based wallpapers are now able to fully participate in the dark/light wallpaper switching feature. (David W., KDE Bugzilla #519168)

Fixed a bug that prevented explanatory text showing up as expected in the generic “[app] wants to do [thing]” portal dialog. (David Redondo, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #584)

Plasma 6.7

Fixed a very odd issue that would break the Icons-Only Task Manager widget if you created a file named metadata.desktop right inside your home folder. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #521247)

If you somehow manage to delete a multi-activity setup’s active activity, Plasma now switches you to the next one instead of crashing and leaving you with a broken desktop. (Angel Parra, KDE Bugzilla #521124)

Fixed a case where Discover could crash while processing changes to distro packages. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, discover MR #1335)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when waking from sleep after monitors were added or removed during sleep. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=521078)

Fixed a case where System Monitor would crash when quit while the column configuration dialog was open. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #491000)

Worked around an issue in GTK 4 that could make selected text in some GTK 4 apps become irritatingly de-selected. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #517573)

Fixed a weird regression that could make the pointer inappropriately display the “app is launching” animation when minimizing windows using the Plastik window decoration style. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #516264)

Fixed a regression that made non-random wallpaper slideshows start over from the first one at every login, instead of remembering the last-seen wallpaper. (Fushan Wen, KDE Bugzilla #512559)

Fixed a regression that made System Monitor’s Process Table view display unformatted data. (Arjen Hiemstra, libksysguard MR #476)

Fixed a very weird issue that could make KWin get confused and stop running animations and animated effects properly after opening an app that creates an invisible window. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #519789)

Fixed an issue that could sometimes make the Weather Report widget endlessly reload after waking the system from sleep. (Ce Sun, KDE Bugzilla #517280)

Made System Monitor graphs’ axis labels show fractional values when needed. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #521041)

Made it possible to un-favorite apps that are marked as favorites in Kickoff/Kicker/etc. even if they contain some weird character combinations. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #520894)

Fixed an issue that could make the notification icon in the System Tray get stuck in a half-rotated state if the animation got interrupted for any reason. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #458156)

Fixed an issue that made a translated label turn into an English label after changing and saving settings on System Settings’ Screen Locking page. (Sergey Katunin, KDE Bugzilla #521293)

Made the Color Picker widget not visually overflow when placed inside a Grouping widget. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #517052)

Frameworks 6.28

Fixed a weird issue that could make Plasma freeze if you created a .desktop file, set its icon to be a local AVIF image, and put it on the desktop. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #521200)

Qt 6.11.2

Fixed an apparently fairly common way that Plasma could crash when fetching album art for remote media (for example, on YouTube) shown in Media Player widgets. (Mårten Nordheim, KDE Bugzilla #505490)

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: Fixing all the things

Nate Graham and John Veness — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week the team continued polishing Plasma 6.7 for its release later in the month. As such, this week saw mostly bug fixing.

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7

Hovering over a partially-visible item in the Kickoff Application Launcher widget no longer unexpectedly automatically scrolls the view to show the entire item. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #426015)

Spectacle’s feature to automatically copy the screenshot to the clipboard is now temporarily turned off while extracting text via OCR, so that the extracted text makes it onto the clipboard instead. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #520758)

When launching an app from a terminal window, the animated launch feedback effect now ends after the app launches, as expected. (Nicolas Fella, Vlad Zahorodnii, and Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #459986)

Plasma 6.8

Notifications about connected devices having low battery power are now shown in full-screen apps so you won’t miss them, just like notifications for the internal battery being low. (Jan Bidler, plasma-workspace MR #6623)

The Peek at Desktop and Window Aperture effects now respect the system-wide animation speed setting. (Sudip Datta, KDE Bugzilla #490531)

Frameworks 6.27

KRunner now assumes you mean US pints rather than Imperial pints when you convert to or from them, since pints are still official in the USA. (Nate Graham, kunitconversion MR #86)

After

Before

Disk sizes displayed in various places now fully respect your preference regarding storage units. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #518493)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.6

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while refreshing the list of nearby wireless networks. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #519739)

Fixed an issue that reset custom tiling layouts on portrait-rotated monitors after restarting the system. (Hynek Schlindenbuch, KDE Bugzilla #514355)

Searching for an app in the Kicker Application Menu widget and launching one that isn’t the first item in the search results list no longer launches it twice. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #521001)

Plasma 6.7

Fixed a regression in VNC-based screen sharing that prevented the Ctrl and Alt modifier from being sent to the machine being controlled. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #519690)

Fixed an issue that could make Plasma freeze if you quickly switch months in the Digital Clock widget by dragging on the calendar view multiple times in quick succession. (Sander Wolswijk, KDE Bugzilla #511028)

Made the Task Manager Widget’s “Move to Desktop” feature work on grouped tasks. (Hynek Schlindenbuch, KDE Bugzilla #520777)

Fixed two issues with the Grouping widget: not re-appearing instantly after undoing deleting it, and a phantom header remaining visible after removing the last app from it. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #517044 and KDE Bugzilla #517043)

Fixed a variety of issues with icons or list items not properly reversing themselves when using a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Tobias Fella and Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #518932, KDE Bugzilla #518909, KDE Bugzilla #518935, KDE Bugzilla #518835, and KDE Bugzilla #518837)

Made System Settings raise and focus its window as expected when launched using a higher-than-default level of focus stealing prevention. (Kai Uwe Broulik, systemsettings MR #408)

Frameworks 6.27

Switching between light and dark Global Themes no longer sometimes results in various UI elements in Plasma only changing their colors halfway. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #503671)

Fixed an issue saving and retrieving config data in cases where a setting has been given a system-wide default value by the OS vendor that differs from KDE’s own default value. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #509416)

Fixed various related issues with network shares auto-mounted using systemd, including the trash not working properly, and appearing strangely in GUI apps. (Oliver Schramm, KDE Bugzilla #518012)

Fixed an issue that made it impossible to rename files on the desktop via the “Suggest new name” feature in the overwrite dialog. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #509461)

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: 6.7 Beta 2 Released

Nate Graham and John Veness — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week the team continued getting Plasma 6.7 in great shape for release. So there was lots of focus on bug-fixing and UI polishing.

We’ve released the second beta of Plasma 6.7, jam-packed with the latest fixes. If you can, please install it and test everything! There are many options for doing so.

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7

Made it impossible to accidentally drag a window so far off a screen edge that it couldn’t be moved back. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #495635)

Uninstalling an application now removes it from the history section of all the various launcher widgets. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #437303)

Made auto-hide panels compatible with the “Switch desktop on edge > Always enabled” setting. (Francesco Panarese, KDE Bugzilla #370964)

The Application Launcher’s “All Applications” view now groups apps case-insensitively, so apps whose first letter is lowercase no longer get pushed into their own group. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #501788)

Clarified how the option to create a virtual screen works in the screen chooser dialog. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #517296)

Plasma 6.8

The lock screen now fully respects the timeout value set by PAM on the underlying system, instead of adding its own mandatory delay on top of it. This means on systems with the delay set to 0, you can re-type your password immediately after getting it wrong. (Tobias Fella, plasma-desktop MR #3702 and plasma-workspace MR #322)

The lock screen now notifies you when the “Slow Keys” accessibility feature is turned on, just in case you’re failing to type your password and don’t know why. (Martin Riethmayer, plasma-desktop #3726 and plasma-workspace MR #6626)

Discover’s dialog about a Flatpak app being replaced by another one now reassures you that your data will be automatically transferred, and also warns you that favorites/shortcuts/etc. to the old app will have to be re-made manually. (Nate Graham, discover MR #1342 and discover MR #1343)

Reduced the amount of visual flickering when Discover checks for updates. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Bugzilla #513220)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.6

Fixed a case where KWin could crash when a monitor was rapidly power-cycled or some of its settings were rapidly changed. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #520145)

Fixed a case where the kactivitymanagerd service could crash in the background. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #520595)

Fixed a clipboard-related issue that could make XWayland-using apps lag or freeze right after locking the screen. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #520674)

Fixed an issue that could make the large text of the digital clock displayed on the lock and login screens look kind of jagged with certain specific fonts. (Filip Fila, KDE Bugzilla #516314)

Plasma 6.7

Worked around an oddly-specific issue in Qt that could make widgets break when enabled in the System Tray after having previously disabled them and then restarted the computer. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #520144)

Worked around an issue with the hardware or firmware on specific laptops that could trigger an infinite stream of keyboard brightness OSDs after closing the lid. (Vitaly Repin, powerdevil MR #632)

Fixed an issue that could make a renamed file on the desktop visually disappear (it still existed, and could be accessed through Dolphin) while multiple Activities were in use, or move to another location when there was only one Activity. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #520633 and KDE Bugzilla #511920)

Fixed an issue that made it impossible to use a hardware key to authenticate to an 802.1x-protected network. (Katharina Bogad, KDE Bugzilla #520449)

Fixed an issue that made the Networks widget show the wrong icon for an OVS bridge network. (Ivan Perevalov, KDE Bugzilla #517384)

Fixed an issue that could make Plasma’s built-in remote desktop server lag or freeze when copying certain specific things in certain specific apps. (Paul Hoskinson, KDE Bugzilla #520175)

Fixed an issue that made it impossible to focus the Network Widget’s search field using Ctrl+F. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #515280)

Fixed an issue that made the buttons on the fingerprint enrollment dialog get misplaced. (Harald Sitter, KDE Bugzilla #515824)

Fixed an issue with the Breeze theming of GTK apps that made sidebar separator lines turn bright white with dark color schemes. (Levi Leal, KDE Bugzilla #484383)

Plasma 6.8

Fixed two issues that could make KWin crash or fail to evaluate mathematical calculations from the Overview effect. (Alexander Lohnau, KDE Bugzilla #519923 and KDE Bugzilla #483147)

Fixed an issue that made it impossible to open the panel context menu while already in edit mode. (Tobias Fella, libplasma MR #1468)

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: Xe Driver Support and Polishing Discover

Nate Graham and John Veness — Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week the focus was squarely on polishing up Plasma 6.7 in preparation for release on June 16th. Bugs were squashed, user interfaces were improved, and amidst it all, a lovely community contribution added support for monitoring modern Intel GPUs. Check it all out:

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7

Clearing the clipboard while any items are starred no longer asks if you want to clear the starred items as well; now they are never automatically cleared, and you have to do this manually, on the logic that if you starred those items, you probably want to keep them around! (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6583)

When the Disks & Devices widget appears after you plug in a disk, it no longer briefly flashes with the notification icon. (Bohdan Onofriichuk, KDE Bugzilla #495141)

Plasma 6.8

When Discover prompts you to delete data and settings for a no-longer-installed Flatpak app, doing so now sends all that stuff to the trash rather than deleting it immediately and irreversibly. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #520220)

Re-arranged the sections on Discover’s home page to put the “Editor’s choice” section closer to the top. (Raresh Rus, discover MR #1333)

Reduced the amount of visual jankiness in Discover’s “overall progress” indicator UI during system updates. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #510282)

Made the search on Discover’s Updates page case-insensitive. (Tobias Ozór, discover MR #1328)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.6

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when you switched Activities using the Activity Pager widget. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #520065)

Worked around a Qt regression that made job progress notifications remain visible on screen until explicitly dismissed. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #520120)

Fixed an issue that broke the setting to remember your approvals in the screencasting permission dialog. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #517454)

Fixed an issue that mis-rendered non-default window decoration themes when using a scale factor below 100%. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #520272)

Fixed an issue that broke Global Themes’ ability to add and position widgets as expected. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #512005)

Plasma 6.7

Fixed some cases where Plasma could crash when plugging in or unplugging screens. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #468430)

Worked around a Qt issue that could sometimes make the crash reporter tool itself crash in a loop. (Harald Sitter, KDE Bugzilla #517353)

Fixed an issue that could make Discover sometimes crash when installing a Flatpak app from a downloaded .flatpakref file. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #520371)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while a Weather Report widget was checking for weather updates. (David Edmundson, kdeplasma-addons MR #1051)

Fixed a bizarre issue that could make the Kickoff Application Launcher widget grow vertically on X11 immediately after opening it following a switch to an alternative widget and back right after login. (Harald Sitter, KDE Bugzilla #515116)

Strengthened the system to prevent gaps from appearing between the screens in a multi-monitor setup. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #507702)

Fixed an issue in the Global Theme creator feature that saved panel settings incorrectly. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #520489)

Fixed an issue in the Digital Clock widget that mis-colored the dots for calendar events on the previous month. (Young Lord, plasma-workspace #6587)

Fixed two pointer issues seen while zoomed in using KWin’s Zoom effect: duplicated pointers while shaking to make them bigger, and pointers becoming visually de-synchronized while dragging things. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #489265 and KDE Bugzilla #513233)

Fixed an issue that could make Discover report different states in different pages for an app currently being installed or uninstalled. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bugzilla #520028)

Plasma 6.8

Fixed an issue that made it impossible to add an app to your favorites list immediately after un-installing and re-installing it. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #494542)

Frameworks 6.27

Fixed a visual glitch sometimes seen in Discover’s sidebar when the app was launched. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #520337)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.7

Fixed a couple of memory leaks discovered in KWin. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9235)

Plasma 6.8

Added support for the Intel Xe driver to the System Monitor app and widgets. (Hunter Hardy, KDE Bugzilla #512866)

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: 6.7 beta release

Nate Graham and John Veness — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week we released a public beta of Plasma 6.7, ready for testing. A last-minute virtual keyboard feature snuck in… and with that, it’s now frozen for further features, and focus will shift to polishing and bug-fixing for the next month or two.

So let’s have a look:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.7

You can now configure what triggers Plasma’s virtual keyboard to appear. (Kristen McWilliam, Xaver Hugl, and Yelsin Sepulveda, kwin MR #9206 and plasma-workspace MR #6548)

The per-window “Hide from Screencast” feature now also hides the window from static screenshots, too. It’s been renamed accordingly. (Elliot Flint, kwin MR #9171)

You can now allow an app that’s controlling input devices to do it every time it asks, instead of having to authorize it each time. (David Redondo, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #496 and flatpak-kcm MR #175)

Plasma 6.8

Plasma’s virtual keyboard now has a dedicated layout and mode of operation for the Amharic language! (Abenezer Wesenseged, plasma-keyboard MR #118)

System Settings’ Networks page now lets you configure wireless access points to automatically select a channel. (Mickaël Thomas, plasma-nm MR #523)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.6.6

Made a couple of buttons on System Settings’ Fonts page readable by the Orca screen reader. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #519471)

Plasma 6.7

Discover now groups items on its “Installed” page into categories by default! This makes it much easier to find what you’re looking for. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #423344)

Plasma notifications now slide in from off-screen, rather than fading in. It looks really good, and helps draw attention to new notifications without being too attention-grabbing. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #9139)

Improved the Kickoff Application Launcher’s ability to launch the item you searched for with a very fast press of the Enter key after some very fast typing. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #519579)

Gwenview is now set to be Plasma’s default SVG viewer, so these files won’t open with GIMP by default anymore. (Darafei Praliaskouski, plasma-desktop MR #3712)

Made multiple improvements to the workflow around unlocking the session using a smart card. (Andreas Lundqvist, kscreenlocker MR #310)

Moved the “Keep Above Others” window tweak to the top level of the titlebar context menu so you can reach it more easily. We reasoned that this is likely to be one of the more frequently-used items, so it ought to be faster to access. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #9201)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.6

Fixed an issue that made Plasma crash when restarted using systemctl restart --user plasma-plasmashell.service on systems with multiple screens and multiple panels. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #515234)

Fixed an issue that made Plasma crash when switching Activities using the Activity Pager widget on systems with multiple screens. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #520065)

Cloning a panel now successfully copies any standalone launcher icons, too. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #519502)

The System Monitor app and sensors no longer continue to report phantom network activity while the system isn’t connected to any networks. (Kartikeya Tyagi, KDE Bugzilla #508516)

Typing on the desktop to invoke KRunner now works when pressing keys on the number pad, too. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #504304)

App reviews in Discover no longer get duplicated if you install, uninstall, and re-install the app while Discover remained open. (Tobias Fella, discover MR #1325)

Frameworks 6.27

Fixed a layout issue that could sometimes break Discover completely when the system language was set to Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #517091)

The Breeze Icons repo no longer inappropriately uses copyrighted third-party icons. (Nate Graham and Martin Sh., KDE Bugzilla #487595)

Fixed a subtle issue in the common icon browser dialog that made it impossible to select a standard icon from the active icon theme after first selecting an icon from a specific location on disk. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #520007)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.7

Implemented support for “progressive encoding” for Plasma’s built-in remote desktop server, which can be used when a client doesn’t support H.264 encoding, or codecs for it aren’t available, or when progressive encoding would be more bandwidth-efficient. (David Edmundson, krdp MR #165 and krdp MR #173)

Improved performance and reduced latency for Plasma’s built-in remote desktop server. (David Edmundson, krdp MR #170)

Implemented support for version 3.2 of the Wayland Text Input protocol. (David Edmundson, kwin MR #8970)

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: ICC profiles ❤️ HDR

Nate Graham and John Veness — Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week saw a lot of lower-level technical improvements made throughout Plasma’s software stack. Not super flashy, but super important.

Nevertheless, two color-related features did manage to sneak in! And as Plasma 6.7’s feature period comes to a close, expect more polishing and bug-fixing for the next month or so.

Without further ado:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.7

You can now use an ICC profile while HDR mode is active! (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #514239)

You can now disable or control the intensity of the “adaptive backlight modulation” feature of many AMD laptops, which changes screen colors at low brightness levels to try to improve visibility. If you don’t like it, you can now turn it off! (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #511801)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7

Improved Discover’s ability to de-duplicate apps present in both system and user Flatpak installations. (Tobias Fella, Discover MR #1316)

The temperature values on Info Center’s Sensors page now reflect the units you have configured system-wide, rather than always using Celcius. (Chandradeep Dey, kinfocenter MR #294)

You can now remove apps from the Kickoff Application Launcher’s Favorites view by dragging them out of the view and over any part of the rest of the widget. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #3662)

The Printers widget now shows badges indicating the number of active and queued print jobs on each printer. Useful for large institutional environments with a lot of printers! (Mike Noe, print-manager MR #324)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.5

Fixed an issue that made the power buttons vanish from launcher menus for some people with version 260 of systemd, which changed around some things we were relying on. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #518174)

Fixed an issue that caused periodic freezes and stutters on some systems with multiple discrete GPUs. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #519461)

Fixed an issue that could make Discover crash on some distros while changing the priorities of Flatpak repos. (Tobias Fella, discover MR #1318)

The portal-based dialog to add launchers now actually works. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #519631)

Using window rules to move a window partially off-screen using a negative position property no longer makes the window disappear and become unreachable. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #466119)

Fixed one source of a tricky issue that could make secondary screens inappropriately remain dimmed after waking from sleep. (Patryk Ludwikowski, KDE Bugzilla #513809)

Fixed a recent visual regression in the hover highlighting effects applied to the Printers widget. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #518705)

Plasma 6.7

Fixed an issue that could sometimes cause custom non-default global shortcuts to be reset during software updates on specific distros that uninstall and re-install apps as part of their upgrade processes. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #484597)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.7

Improved performance and power efficiency for software that uses CPU rendering, such as most QtWidgets-based Qt and KDE apps. Read more about this on Xaver’s blog! (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9178)

Improved KWin’s heuristics for when it can use the “direct scan-out” feature to improve performance and save power for full-screen windows. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #515784)

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: Background Apps and Zoom Up-Scaling

Nate Graham and John Veness — Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week Plasma 6.7 entered its “soft feature freeze” where we stop merging newly-written features and focus on finishing up and merging the ones that were already in flight.

As such, some nice new features that have been in development for quite some time were merged this week!

In addition, Plasma got a number of nice quality-of-life UI improvements and some accessibility fixes, among other changes. A good haul this week:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.7

Implemented support for the “Background apps” portal. This allows apps (especially newer GNOME apps) that use this portal to put themselves in the background and appear as icons in the System Tray, alongside the similar icons for other apps that use the existing System Tray icon functionality. (David Redondo, plasma-workspace MR #5703)

Implemented an up-scaling feature for screen content when using KWin’s Zoom effect. The filter does its best to sharpen and upscale content, resulting in a smoother and less blocky appearance, especially at relatively high zoom levels. If this effect isn’t for you, you can turn it off. (Ritchie Frodomar, KDE Bugzilla #509770)

Medium magnification

High magnification

Massive magnification

The Printers widget is now badged with the number of active and queued print jobs. (Mike Noe, print-manager MR #323)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7

XWayland-using software that asks to be able to send synthetic keyboard and mouse events (such as xdotool, which it turns out a bunch of apps invoke) is now identified by name so you know what’s asking. In addition, you can see a list of apps you’ve given this permission to, and revoke it later. (David Redondo, kwin MR #9123)

xdotool can control the pointer and keyboard, and warning about the potential for other apps to impersonate it" src="https://blogs.kde.org/2026/05/02/this-week-in-plasma-background-apps-and-zoom-up-scaling/always-allow-xdotool.png" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" />

Implemented some KDE styling to the generic MessageDialog component from Qt, which resolves the issue of these dialogs looking really ugly and out of place in various pieces of software, including the Sticky Note widget’s deletion confirmation dialog. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #499562)

After

Before

Improved how Discover handles being launched with no internet connection. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #511002)

Improved how Discover communicates that a firmware update has been queued for installation after the next restart. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #422498)

Removed the “double back button” effect visible in the Networks widget when showing a network’s QR code. (Tobias Fella, plasma-nm MR #541)

Made the automatic screen brightness feature take into account more data points, hopefully making it more responsive to your desires and less swingy when in an environment where the background lighting is changing a lot. (Prajna Sariputra, kwin MR #9145)

Made the buttons at the top of the Widget Explorer sidebar respect Fitts’ Law, allowing you to activate them by jamming the pointer against the adjacent screen edge and clicking. (Tobias Fella, plasma-desktop MR #3511 and libplasma MR #1479)

Streamlined the presentation of the notification about your KDE-Connect-connected phone being low on battery power. (Kai Uwe Broulik, powerdevil MR #619)

You now have more than 25 seconds to pick a color once you’ve invoked this from the Color Picker widget. Now you can take as long as you like. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kdeplasma-addons MR #1013)

Frameworks 6.26

Improved the appearance of the cross-fade transition when moving between pages in many Kirigami-based apps. (HeCheng Yu, kirigami MR #2079)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.5

Fixed an issue that made Plasma Login Manager fail to launch properly on certain devices with certain graphics hardware — in particular Apple silicon laptops. (Matthias Kurz, plasma-login-manager MR #130)

Fixed an issue that made touches on a touchscreen stop applying to the correct part of the screen when the touchscreen was mirrored to another screen with different geometry. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #514688)

Made it possible to select a sound theme using the keyboard. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #519194)

Fixed a visual glitch on System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page that made the lines indicating mappings for stylus buttons fly off the top-left corner of the window with certain tablets. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #519600)

Plasma 6.7

Fixed a case where KWin could crash when activating an item on a hidden panel while using the in-development Vulkan rendering backend. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #518721)

Fixed two cases of controls on System Settings’ Quick Settings page not being read by the Orca screen reader. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #519433)

Disabling KRunner plugins globally now turns them off in the Kicker Application Menu widget, too. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #501200)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.6.5

Fixed some performance issues experienced on a variety of NVIDIA GPUs that were introduced by version 595 of the proprietary NVIDIA driver. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #517987)

Plasma 6.7

Implemented support for renaming or relocating the new cross-desktop standard “Projects” folder that’s started to appear in people’s home folders. (Jakob Dev, plasma-desktop MR #3657)

Implemented version 2 of the “Input Capture” portal. (David Redondo, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #493)

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: fanciness in Discover and more power efficiency

Nate Graham and John Veness — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week includes an interesting blend of improvements. Lots of visual stuff, so get ready for a ton of screenshots and screen recordings!

Notable new features

Plasma 6.7

The Kicker Application Menu widget can now be configured to show a “Recent Locations” item. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #420951)

Network connections can now be duplicated. (Kartikeya Tyagi, KDE Bugzilla #499188)

There’s now a new “has parent window” window rule you can use to target child dialog windows specifically. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kwin MR #8969)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.6.5

Dragging a search result for a System Settings page to the desktop now creates a launcher to that page as you would expect. This completes a mini-project to improve dragging-and-dropping things to the desktop that we started a while back. (Antti Savolainen, KDE Bugzilla #500259)

Plasma 6.7

Discover now has fancier application page headers with more obvious install buttons! (Oliver Beard, discover MR #1297)

Discover no longer disables the “More Information” button on list items for in-progress updates. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #431719)

Discover now does a better job of handling the rare case where an automatic update to a Flatpak app introduces a compatibility issue you can’t easily recover from. Now it will warn you about this once instead of continuously. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #509760)

You can now drag favorite apps out of their areas in Kicker and Dashboard to un-favorite them. Kickoff is coming soon, too! (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #3665 and KDE Bugzilla #518749)

When your laptop is plugged in at maximum charge, doing something that changes the power profile to a non-default one now shows only the power profile icon in the System Tray, and omits the fully-charged battery icon because that part is obvious. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #518802)

Improved some awkwardly-worded labels in System Settings and Plasma. (Philipp Kiemle, plasma-desktop MR #3674 and plasma-workspace MR #6522)

Frameworks 6.26

Reduced the amount of blurriness seen in icons throughout QtQuick-based apps using the Kirigami.Icon component when using a low fractional scale factor like 150% or less. (Volodymyr Zolotopupov, kirigami MR #2070)

Before:

After:

Added a search provider for startpage.com, so you can search there from KRunner. (Antti Savolainen, KDE Bugzilla #503976)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.5

Fixed a case where the Plasma Login Manager could crash when connecting and disconnecting multiple monitors while the login screen is visible. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #519302)

Fixed some cases where Plasma could crash at login. (David Edmundson, plasma-workspace MR #6520)

Fixed multiple accessibility issues: key repeat not working in the Orca screen reader, and various UI elements not being read properly. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #519143, KDE Bugzilla #519333, and KDE Bugzilla #519217)

Fixed a tricky issue in Spectacle that could make large images fail to automatically copy to the clipboard right after the app exits. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #509065)

Fixed another cause of the issue whereby de-focused full-screen windows could sometimes inappropriately appear at the top of the window stack. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #484155)

Fixed a layout glitch on System Settings’ Colors page that could make UI elements in the color previews overflow when using some non-default fonts and font sizes. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #516413)

Changing the brightness or any screen settings no longer terminates Spectacle’s sectangular region recordings. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9127)

Frameworks 6.26

Fixed some visual glitches around radio buttons in the Audio Volume widget. (David Edmundson, ksvg MR #103)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.6.5

Fixed an issue that made System Settings’ Touchscreen page appear while the “highlight changed settings” feature is enabled even if you don’t have a touchscreen. (Jin Liu, KDE Bugzilla #518868)

Plasma 6.7

Turned on the “overlay planes” feature for Intel GPUs, which should improve performance and save some energy when using cooperative games and apps. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #8699)

Improved power efficiency for full-screen windows and effects that don’t gain any benefit from using the “direct scan-out” feature; now they’ll only use it if it will save power. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9120)

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: Per-Screen Virtual Desktops and Wayland Session Restore

Nate Graham and John Veness — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

Last week over 20 KDE contributors converged on the Austrian city of Graz for our annual mega-sprint. It was a busy week, offering a good opportunity for the kinds of face-to-face conversations that can unblock stuck work and reach new consensus. Expect reports to appear on Planet KDE over the next week or two.

We skipped an issue of TWiP due to the sprint but these past two weeks have indeed been busy! Some major features landed, along with a slew of impactful UI improvements. Let’s get right into it:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.7

Each screen can now switch between any of the system’s virtual desktops independently! (Hynek Schlindenbuch, KDE Bugzilla #107302)

You can now choose your default calendar app on System Settings’ Default Applications page. (Denys Madureira, plasma-workspace MR #6468)

…And you can now middle-click on the Digital Clock widget to open the calendar app you’ve configured there. (Denys Madureira, plasma-workspace MR #6462)

You can now configure the Alt+Tab window switcher to always appear on the primary screen, rather than whichever screen has keyboard focus or the pointer on it. (Yuki Tsujii, KDE Bugzilla #329696)

You can now mark app-specific actions that you find in a search as favorites. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6224)

The Kicker Application Menu widget now highlights newly-installed apps, just like the Kickoff Application Launcher widget does. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #3649)

You can now drag-and-drop apps to the “Favorites” sections of the Kickoff, Kicker, and Dashboard widgets. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #383302 and plasma-desktop MR #3652)

If you find yourself captivated by a picture of the day wallpaper image, you can now right-click on it and access external information about it. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kdeplasma-addons MR #1035)

You can now optionally set Discover to quit after installing updates. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #508743)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.6.5

While entering the password for a Wi-Fi network using the Networks widget, the password field no longer loses keyboard focus if you happen to move the pointer away from it. (Tobias Fella, plasma-nm MR #556)

Plasma 6.7

There’s now a new standard “Badge” component in Kirigami, and many parts of Plasma have been ported to use it. (Nate Graham, kirigami MR #1847, plasma-desktop MR #3089, plasma-workspace MR #6488, systemsettings MR #399, discover MR #1290, and kinfocenter MR #262)

After

Before

The Input Method System Tray widget no longer disables the active input method if you click it while the input method isn’t currently visible. Now it just shows and hides it. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, plasma-workspace MR #6485)

Improved the design of Discover’s grid and list items, which also slightly increases the information density of the pages that show them. (Nate Graham, discover MR #1292)

After

Before

The Kicker Application Menu widget now shows tooltips for items whose labels have been elided. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #515608)

System Monitor now differentiates multiple GPUs by their names, rather than by arbitrary numbers. (Bernhard Friedreich, libksysguard MR #464 and ksystemstats MR #129)

System Monitor now exposes top-level actions you can use to launch it and go straight to a specific page. These can be invoked from the app’s context menu, or via a global shortcut you set yourself. (Bernhard Friedreich, plasma-systemmonitor MR #427)

The Margins Separator widget is now added from the panel configuration dialog’s “Add New” menu, rather than the widget explorer sidebar. This matches how the similar spacer widget is added. (Antti Savolainen, plasma-workspace MR #6494 and plasma-desktop MR #3663)

The clipboard popup invoked with Meta+V now closes if it’s open when you press that keyboard shortcut a second time. (Kristem McWilliam, plasma-workspace MR #6450)

Improved how System Settings’ Shortcuts page handles being told to assign a shortcut that’s already assigned to something else. (David Bacskay-Nagy, KDE Bugzilla #484526 and KDE Bugzilla #489544)

KRunner now lets you evaluate fancy mathematical expressions more flexibly; in the past you could ask for sqrt(2) + 2 but not 2 + sqrt(2); now both are accepted. (Alex Cizinsky, KDE Bugzilla #496343)

Frameworks 6.26

The dialog that asks you if you want to launch or edit an executable text file (like a .desktop file) no longer gives you the opportunity to tell it to always do that thing. This behavior was making .desktop files un-launchable for people who selected the option to always open those types of files in a text editor. Anyone who wants to use this feature can still configure it in Dolphin’s settings. (Nate Graham, kio MR #2171)

After

Before

Removed the CFP franc from the list of common currencies, so it no longer shows up automatically for every currency conversion run using KRunner-powered searches. (Pellaeon Lin, kunitconversion MR #84)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.4

Fixed a case where Plasma Keyboard could crash after Alt+Tabbing away from a window marked as “keep above others”. (Devin Lin, KDE Bugzilla #517087)

Worked around a bug added in Qt 6.11 that made some of Spectacle’s annotation tools unclickable. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bugzilla #515304)

Fixed a layout issue in the Activity Pager widget that made it look weird at specific non-default panel sizes. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #518451)

Plasma 6.6.5

Fixed a case where KWin could crash on logout when the session that’s closing had sent any emulated keyboard or mouse events. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #9092)

Fixed an issue with the screen locker that could cause the buttons to malfunction and leave you unable to unlock after you pressed the Esc key in combination with various other actions with specific timings. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #515299)

Fixed an issue that made color picker functionality throughout the system return random colors on systems with certain graphics hardware. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #518770)

Fixed an issue that made the clock times shown on the lockscreen differ across the screens of a multi-screen setup. (DeepChirp, KDE Bugzilla #516479)

Fixed two issues that made network connections added from the Plasma setup wizard not always work properly. (Adam Williamson, KDE Bugzilla #514841 and plasma-setup MR #100)

Fixed a couple of cases where auto-hide panels might not hide properly when there were any unread notifications. (Patrick Cleary, KDE Bugzilla #519046)

Switching away from the Networks Widget in the System Tray no longer briefly makes a placeholder message appear. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #511367)

Improved the reliability of the Weather Widget’s icon fallback behavior, making it less likely to show broken weather icons. (Ismael Asensio, kdeplasma-addons MR #1032)

Plasma 6.7

Fixed an issue that could make the Audio Volume widget not notice that a new audio device was connected and became the default one. (Oliver Beard, plasma-pa MR #393)

Using the clipboard’s non-default “Never save [non-text items] in history” option no longer breaks the ability to paste items that have been moved to the top of the clipboard history. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #514095)

Apps in the Quick Launch widget can once again be re-arranged. (Alex Folland, KDE Bugzilla #481922)

Fixed two quirky issues with Spectacle’s magnifier in Rectangular Region mode. (Noah Davis, KDE Bugzilla #509776 and KDE Bugzilla #509777)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.7

KWin now supports the Wayland session management protocol! This is an important step for apps to be able to remember their sizes and positions after restarting the system. The next step is for toolkits, libraries, and apps to implement support. We’re getting there! (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #436318)

Reduced the size of animated GIF images produced by apps like Spectacle that use KDE’s KPipeWire library. (Bernhard Friedrich, kpipewire MR #247)

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.

Nate Graham on KDE Blogs

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Notable new features

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Notable bug fixes

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Frameworks 6.30

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Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.6.7

Plasma 6.7.5

Plasma 6.8

Frameworks 6.30

How you can help

To get a new Plasma feature or a bug fix mentioned here

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Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

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Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

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Plasma 6.7.5

Plasma 6.8

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How you can help

To get a new Plasma feature or a bug fix mentioned here

This Quarter in KDE Digital Sovereignty: Q2 2026

Quality assurance and testing

IMAP4 revision 2

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WebDAV push notifications

Network share handling

Data integrity

Configuration management

Looking forward

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Efficiency & performance

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Bugs fixed

Documentation

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How you can help

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Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7.4

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Kup 0.11.0

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Plasma 6.7.4

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Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8

Frameworks 6.29

How you can help

To get a new Plasma feature or a bug fix mentioned here

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