Everyone kept hammering on the bugs this week. As a result, the number of open Plasma 6 issues decreased, and so did the number of older high and very high priority Plasma issues! I’m feeling really good about this release. Daily driving it is already a pleasure. I think it might be a winner. 🙂
KDE 6 Mega-Release
(Includes all software to be released on the February 28th mega-release: Plasma 6, Frameworks 6, and apps from Gear 24.02)
General info – Open issues: 199
UI improvements
The “Advanced Power Settings” page in System settings has now been folded up into a sub-page of the “Energy Settings” page (Jakob Petsovits, link):

Made a variety of improvements to the way device batteries are shown on Info Center’s “Energy” page: more device types are now identified correctly, and their device models are now shown so you can more easily distinguish batteries from different devices of the same type (Shubham Arora, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4)
When you try to connect to a Wi-Fi network but enter the wrong password, you’re now informed of this immediately instead of having to wait a while to learn why it didn’t connect successfully (David Redondo, link)
The Breeze-themed Telegram icon has been updated to better match Telegram’s own branding (Onur Ankut, link):

The Breeze cursor theme now includes more pre-generated sizes, making its cursors look better at various scale factors and in more apps and toolkits that don’t yet conform to the cursor-shape-v1 Wayland protocol (Jin Liu, link)
Ark’s integrated viewer window now remembers its window size the next time you open it (Ilya Pominov, link)
In Spectacle’s Rectangular Region mode, you can now hold down the Shift key to see the magnifier while moving the box using arrow keys (Noah Davis, link)
Bug fixes
Important note: I don’t mention fixes for bugs that were never released to users; it’s just too much for me (it would probably be too much for you to read as well), and most people never encountered them in the first place. Because we’re in the middle of a big Plasma dev cycle, there are a lot of these bugs! So big thanks to everyone who’s made it a priority to fix them!
KWin can no longer crash when told by an app to open window with an invalid size (Xaver Hugl, link)
Editing an app’s .desktop file in such a manner that the file’s Exec= value ends up containing an equals sign no longer causes the properties dialog to crash the next time you use it to edit the same file (Harald Sitter, link)
Fixed a common random Plasma crash (David Redondo, link)
You can no longer crash KMenuEdit by creating a new entry, immediately deleting it, and then clicking “Save” (Harald Sitter, link)
In the Plasma Wayland session, the power and session actions once again work after KWin has crashed (David Edmundson, link)
Fixed several visual glitches related to missing pixels when using multiple screens with any of them having a fractional scale factor (Yifan Zhu, link 1 and link 2)
When using Dolphin’s Details mode to view a folder tree, expanding a folder no longer orders the items incorrectly when the parent view was sorted by size (Akseli Lahtinen, link)
Changes to the cursor size now take effect in Plasma immediately, without needing to restart plasmashell (Vlad Zahorodnii and others, link)
Using the “Cut” command on files and folders in Dolphin once again causes them to become visually desaturated (Jin Liu, link)
GTK4 apps now use the current KWin-provided window closing animation, instead of just disappearing immediately (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
When using Elisa in mobile mode, its playlist sidebar can once again be closed (Kevin Kofler, link)
The Plasma-themed spinbox UI element now works properly with a wider variety of 3rd-party styling–hopefully all of them! (Marco Martin, link)
Other bug information of note:
- 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 5 as last week). Current list of bugs
- 34 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 41 as last week). Current list of bugs
- 175 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs
Performance & Technical
The Overview effect is now much faster to launch and has smoother animations; this work is now largely done and it represents a major improvement! (Vlad Zahorodnii, Marco Martin, and Arjen Hiemstra, link 1 and link 2)
…And Everything Else
This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.
How You Can Help
We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! Thanks to you we’re now at 91% of our goal of 500 new KDE e.V. members! That’s really close to 95%, which is close to 100%! So I think we might actually make it… if you like the work we’re doing, spreading the wealth is a great way to share the love. 🙂
If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Which issues? These issues. Plasma 6 is very usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bug-fixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by February.
Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

























