This week probably the biggest news is that in Plasma 6, the Night Color feature will work as expected on Wayland when you’re using an NVIDIA GPU! Because NVIDIA’s drivers don’t support the necessary Gamma LUT features to make it work in an optimal way as on Intel and AMD GPUs, we had to use a slightly different approach that isn’t quite as efficient. But hopefully that’s better than not having the feature work at all, and if you care about the increased resource usage, you’re welcome to not use the feature. This work was done by Xaver Hugl. Thanks, Xaver!
User Interface Improvements
KRunner search results for very short 2 and 3 character strings should be a bit better and more relevant now (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
System Settings’ sidebar now has better keyboard navigation, and lets you use the arrow keys instead of the tab keys if you’d prefer or if you’re using a device with a d-pad and no obvious tab key (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
In the Plasma Wayland session, when you activate a KWin effect with a touchpad gesture in a certain direction, the opposite gesture now deactivates it (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.0. Link)
System Settings’ File Search page has gotten a visual overhaul and now looks nicer (me: Nate Graham and Helden Hoierman, Plasma 6.0. Link):
The tooltips showing window previews in the Task Manager no longer time out on their own while the cursor remains hovering over a Task, just like the behavior of other tooltips elsewhere (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6. Link)
Other Significant Bugfixes
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
Spectacle’s sidebar is no longer too narrow to accommodate long button text in some languages (Yoann Laissus, Spectacle 23.04.2. Link)
When using a horizontal bottom panel, Task Manager tooltip window thumbnails no longer sometimes appear in the wrong location (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
In the Plasma X11 session, dragging files to Task Manager Tasks in such a manner that you end up right-clicking while still dragging no longer sometimes causes drag-and-drop to just break (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
In the Plasma Wayland session, some blurred and transparent Breeze-themes context menus no longer sometimes exhibit weird visual glitches (Mouse Zhang, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
When KDE apps are run in dark mode on non-Plasma desktops where the plasma-integration package isn’t installed, Breeze icons will now correctly use light colors instead of staying dark and becoming unreadable (Jan Grulich, Frameworks 5.107. Link)
When your system is set up with an encrypted home directory, file and folder thumbnails will now be stored in their typical cache location in your homedir, preventing them from having to be re-generated every single time (Payton Quinn, Frameworks 5.107. Link)
Other bug-related information of interest:
- 4 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 52 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 50 last week). Current list of bugs
- 76 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs
Automation & Systematization
Now that tons and tons of KDE projects use JSON files to describe their metadata, there’s now a JSON file validator CI job that will prevent silly errors (Alexander Lohnau, right now. Link)
…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
If you’re a user, upgrade to Plasma 5.27! If your distro doesn’t offer it and won’t anytime soon, consider switching to a different one that ships software closer to its developer’s schedules.
If you’re a developer, please please please start living on Plasma 6 and fixing the bugs that you encounter. It’s usable for daily driving (I’m doing so) but still very much pre-alpha and in need of work to get it into a releaseable state by the end of the year.
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!
And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
“When KDE apps are run in dark mode on non-Plasma desktops where the plasma-integration package isn’t installed, Breeze icons will now correctly use light colors instead of staying dark and becoming unreadable (Jan Grulich, Frameworks 5.107. Link)” – This is great. I ran into this problem when testing GNOME the other day. I thought it was their issue but fortunately it’s now fixed. It’s a shame that some people still believe that GNOME users should only use GTK programs and that KDE users should stick to Qt variants. There are good apps in both ecosystems and it’s good for everyone when they work well everywhere. Now, if only Kirigami apps could work in GNOME + Flatpak… The last time I tried, AudioTube was completely broken and unusable with that combination in Fedora 37. That seriously hurts the adoption of KDE apps by non-Plasma users. Kudos to Jan Grulich for fixing that issue and to Nate Graham for writing this blog post.
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Really sorry that NVIDIA didn’t put their foot forward and enabled Gamma LUT with their drivers (the request on their forums is almost two years old). Anyway, kudos to you and Xaver.
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> we had to use a slightly different approach that isn’t quite as efficient.
This is workaround only kicks in when an output is driven by an NVIDIA card, right? There’s no change at all for AMD or Intel card users?
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Correct!
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Why more and more stuff and apps within KDE is getting plain flat and opaque? It got to the point where it feels ridiculously simple-looking. Just a white view and a slightly grey header. Sore to the eye.
The last hero standing is Dolphin but I have no doubt it will be kirigami-ed or qtquick-ed (sorry no idea what’s to blame for the visual simlicity) as well eventually and everything will look like only Discover once used to be. I thought it would become better over time. Instead, every app is “Discover” now.
Sorry I tried to deal with it but I can’t anymore. This white view just bunt out my eyes and the above was my screaming of pain.
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Not sure I understand your point about Dolphin since it’s also a white view with a gray header. This has been our look for ages and ages; it’s not really a new thing. If you don’t like it, well, that’s why we support theming.
Also Discover actually used to be much more colorful and more divergent from how KDE apps normally looked, and the consistent feedback we got was that people hated it.
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This is about the trend of rewriting kcms and so on using unthemmable qtquick which ignores e.g. Kvantum themes. Dolphin is still themmable while Systemsettings to the most part is not. Of course Plasma has been white and gray for a long time, but mb it’s time to move on to smth more eye-friendly like better adoption of blur and transparency as done in macOS or how Breeze’s fork Lightly did?
Breeze Light is not bad at first sight during the daylight. But at night or in the dark it is just too bright. The dark variant is even worse: it makes it really hard to distinguish window’s ui elements, feels like a monotone canvas.
Yes my eyesight is not great. Maybe this is why I see Breeze this way and prefer blurred gradients of other OS – a matter of perception.
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“unthemmable qtquick which ignores e.g. Kvantum themes.”
Sorry, but that is incorrect.
Qt Quick is very much themeable. People can write themes for it, Qt itself provides a number of example Qt Quick styles. Plasma itself maintains two: qqc2-desktop-style which mimics the current Qt Widgets theme, and qqc2-breeze which is a pure Qt Quick implementation of Breeze. Almost evry Plasma desktop install uses qqc2-desktop-style by default.
Your experience seems like qqc2-desktop-style isn’t perfect at mimicking the Widgets style like Kvantum. Many people use it successfully with Kvantum though, even if the mimicry isn’t 100% perfect (transparency and animations are lost, for instance).
But to say that Qt Quick ignores Kvantum is wrong — it does not in a typical Plasma setup using qqc2-desktop-style. It is also wrong to say that it is not themeable.
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Additionally, note that the File Search KCM was *already* QML and had been for several years. The work I did on it last week was to modernize its QML-based design to a newer, better-looking one.
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The new File Search KCM looks really good!
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Roll on Plasma 6!
I don’t use any themes but as they were brought up here, will there be any severe breakages with existing Plasma 5.X themes when updating to Plasma 6 once it rolls around? Some users on rolling distros e.g. Arch may use a custom theme, and having it break on Plasma 6 might be a bit jarring. Of course, it’s up to theme creators to maintain themes and not the Plasma team, just curious is all 🙂
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I don’t know what the compatibility story for Plasma themes is. But I do know that widgets will not be compatible. Many 3rd-party ones are already broken since they use PlasmaComponents 2, which is being removed for Plasma 6 because the Qt technology that it relies on (QtQuickControls 1) is likewise being removed by Qt. So at a minimum, all those widgets will have to port to PlasmaComponents 3. In addition, the widget API is being overhauled in a non-compatible way, so there will be a few other things that all widgets will have to do to be 6-compatible. See the following draft text of the porting guide: https://invent.kde.org/documentation/develop-kde-org/-/merge_requests/291/diffs
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