Excellent progress was made this week towards the goal of full sound theme support in Plasma 6, among other topics–including some important performance work for KWin!
Plasma 6
General info – Open issues: 70
Significantly reduced cursor latency under heavy load in the Plasma Wayland session! (Xaver Hugl, link)
System Settings gained a page to let you configure which sound theme you want to use! (Ismael Asensio, link):
On System Settings’ Notifications for apps page, the per-event configuration window has been merged with the main page to provide a less fragmented cohesive UI (Ismael Asensio, link):
The Digital Clock’s time zones page now adopts a modern frameless style, in the process fixing its scrollview-within-a-scrollview problem (me: Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, and link 3):
The Networks widget now remembers the last tab you visited when you close and re-open it or switch to a different network (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Other New Features
Kate gained a feature to synchronize the scrolling for split views (Someone going by the pseudonym “Ulterno Ω*”, Kate 23.12. Link)
Other Significant Bugfixes
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
Spectacle no longer gets into a quit loop when configured to auto-save as well as quit after manual save (Noah Davis, Spectacle 23.08. Link)
Fixed two ways that Plasma could crash when unpinning or rapidly re-arranging pinned Task Manager apps (Will Horne, Plasma 5.27.7. Link 1 and link 2)
Malformed or maliciously-crafted desktop files can no longer mess up icons for GTK apps all over the place (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.7. Link 1 and link 2)
Fixed a recent regression that could cause Task Manager tasks to show the wrong window thumbnails in their tooltips (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.7. Link)
System Settings’ “Login Screen (SDDM)” Page now internally remembers the last thing you set the login screen wallpaper to (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.27.7. Link)
Other bug-related information of interest:
- 5 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
- 62 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 60 last week). Current list of bugs
- 94 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs
…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 developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bugfixing and polishing to get it into a releasable 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 
> the per-event configuration window has been merged with the main page
This is awesome! Thanks Ismael.
For me, this thing (per-event notifications) is one of the strongest points to prefer KDE apps over non-KDE (electron based, gtk based etc.).
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System Sounds > Why is there no “None” or “Silent” option?
Since I use ALSA for audio I do not have the PulseAudio “System Sounds” sound stream which can be blocked.
I resolved it by making the package manager (pacman) to not extract files (NoExtract option) in “/usr/share/sounds/”.
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Because nobody implemented it yet. 🙂 People using pure ALSA rather than PulseAudio or Pipewire are getting rare; I think it’s highly likely that such a feature, should it get implemented, will only support ALSA users if one of them submits a patch.
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Wondering if people will find “system sounds” in “appearance”…
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Yes, it might be a bit questionable.
Right now the “Appearance” category is basically a proxy for “things that can get changed by Global Themes.” I agree that having the Sound Theme page inside the Audio page is probably more logical, but then it might not be clear that changing your Global Theme can change the sound theme too. It’s something to think about some more.
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In that case, renaming Appearance to Personalization would fit better
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Well, everything in System Settings amounts to personalization. I don’t think that word has meaning in the context of a settings app.
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How about “customisation”?
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Maybe “look and feel”?
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Perhaps it can be under *both* “Appearance” and “Audio”? There are more systemsettings pages that fit under multiple categories. E.g. “Desktop Effects” and “SDDM” are also about “Appearance” but currently found in other categories.
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> Someone going by the pseudonym “Ulterno Ω*”
Maybe it’s time to relax the git “user.name” requirement which tries to enforce real names? Obviously, it doesn’t prevent anyone from using a nick name so what’s the point?
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I think the best is to rename “Appearance” as “Themes”
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Excellent work here, both for the future and from the past.
“per-event configuration window has been merged with the main page” … really glad to see that the modernization of the System Settings is continuing and things are getting clearer and cleaner.
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