These past two weeks in KDE: massive stability work for Plasma 6.1

Sorry for the interruption last week; I was on vacation. While I was vacating, my colleagues were in full-on fix-everything mode in preparation for the upcoming Plasma 6.1 release in a little over a week. And what a release it promises to be! I think this is going to be a good one, folks. Lots of great features, improved performance and smoothness, and oodles of fixes for all kinds of strange bugs with your wild and wacky hardware devices!

New Features

Plasma’s Networks widget now supports WebAuth for SAML-based authentication. I don’t know what this means, but if you do, that probably means you’re happy about it! (Joel Holdsworth, Plasma 6.2.0 Link)

The network QR code that you can show in Plasma’s Networks widget is now draggable, so you can get an image file out of it wherever you want! (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

System Monitor’s data backend now supports getting CPU/memory/IO/etc. pressure data from /proc/pressure/ (when supported by the Linux kernel) and displaying it in sensors. Hopefully this data will start to show up in user-facing features soon! (Adrian Edwards, Plasma 6.2.0 Link)

UI Improvements

Dolphin once again recommends installing Filelight if you try to get information about free space but it’s not installed (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 24.08.0. Link)

Passwords copied from KWalletManager no longer appear visible in the Clipboard widget (Weng Xuetian, KWalletManager 24.08.0. Link)

Plasma’s Panel Settings dialog no longer obscures the hover pop-ups for individual widgets while it’s open (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

In Plasma’s Sticky Notes widget, the colors of the inline buttons already change with the system color scheme. Now they also change appropriately based on the color scheme you select for the sticky note itself! (Evgeniy Harchenko, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

Removed the “Hide utility windows for inactive applications” option, because it was broken and apparently nobody had noticed or reported this, and also it’s kind of a weird thing to exist in the first place. This also fixes a Plasma panel auto-hide bug caused by using it (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Searching in System Settings no longer sometimes returns nonsensical matches based on keywords that got implicitly joined together in ways that didn’t make sense (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

A better cursor icon is now used when dragging windows (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

On X11 with an NVIDIA GPU, a floating panel, and adaptive panel transparency, an unfortunate bug in the NVIDIA driver causes windows to lag when moved and resized. For now we’ve added a warning in the panel settings dialog about this (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Improved the accessibility of the common Kirigami.PlaceholderMessage UI component (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 6.4. Link)

The custom accent color feature (including “accent color from wallpaper”) now does a better job of picking colors for links that will be readable, no matter what colors your base color scheme uses (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

Bug Fixes

Fixed an unusual issue in Elisa that could cause it to not launch when certain DBus setups on certain distros (Jack Hill, Elisa 24.05.1. Link)

Fixed Elisa not launching at all on Windows after a Windows integration library we were using was removed (Jack Hill, Elisa 24.05.1. Link)

Elisa no longer crashes when you try to enqueue the contents of filesystem folders that don’t actually have any music in them (Jack Hill, Elisa 24.05.1. Link)

Spectacle’s highlight annotation once again actually highlights (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05.1. Link)

Fixed a way that KWin could crash after the system wakes from sleep with weird screens that turn on strangely (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

KWin should no longer crash when apps do weird things and for some reason two drag operations end up happening at once (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

Fixed a way that KWin could crash on X11 when you change Global Themes (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

Fixed a weird crash in KWin that could happen when you’re pressing keys on the keyboard during the exact moment that XWayland disconnects (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

Fixed a cause of Plasma using too much memory and/or freezing due to system notifications containing certain sizes of images (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

Changing a System Monitor widget located on a thick panel to the “Application Table” or “Process Table” display style no longer causes Plasma to freeze (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

Fixed the most common crash in System Settings’ Firewall page which could be experienced by changing settings and then switching pages (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

Fixed an extremely esoteric Plasma crash that was caused by repeatedly wiggling the pointer over certain menu items of the context menu of the sub-folder popup of a folder located on the desktop (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

When you try to add a sensor to System Monitor or one of its so-named widgets that you’ve already added, you’re now warned and prevented from doing so, instead of being allowed to continue, which would silently break the display of all sensors (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

Connected devices that are nice enough to report battery information to Plasma no longer sometimes randomly get disconnected for no good reason (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

Some monitors that do unusual and exotic things under the hood no longer get their resolutions set to 640×480 after resuming from sleep (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

The “Allow restore on future sessions” checkbox on the screen sharing dialog once again works (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

Titlebar context menus of non-maximized Aurorae-decorated windows are no longer misplaced on Wayland (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

Kicker’s panel button is no longer too large with a thin panel, which was a regression caused by me trying to keep it from getting too large with thick panels! (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

Connecting a new screen that’s larger than any of the current screens no longer causes it to get a small constrained version of the default wallpaper; now it gets the correct size (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

When you’ve got a floating Plasma panel on a screen edge that’s shared with another screen, it no longer pushes an odd blurry rectangle onto that adjacent screen when it de-floats (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

Using the “Application” or “Window” layout switching mode no longer causes Plasma’s System Tray popup to close immediately when you try to open it while the widget is located on a panel on the bottom or right screen edge (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

Shutting down, restarting, etc. from within KWin’s Overview effect no longer causes it to freeze for 45 seconds before completing the operation (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a bug that caused items on the Plasma desktop to disappear until Plasma was restarted after their icons changed, either because you changed them manually, or they got automatically changed by something else automatically—for example by putting items into the trash (Akseli Lahtinen, Frameworks 6.4. Link)

Worked around a Qt regression that prevented toolbar buttons in QtQuick apps from showing that they have keyboard focus (Aleix Pol Gonzales, Frameworks 6.4. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 5 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 3 two weeks ago). Current list of bugs
• 33 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 36 two weeks ago). Current list of bugs
• 294 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last two weeks. Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Improved the performance of basically everything for cases where the ~/.cache folder is located on a slow disk, such as a hard drive (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

Plasma and KWin no longer rocket up in CPU usage for no good reason when using the using “Keep the selection and clipboard the same” and “Text selection: Always save in history” Clipboard widget settings (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1.0. Link)

Re-enabled hardware-accelerated cursor support for Intel GPUs, since the bugs that were causing us to disable it have since been resolved. This should make cursors more responsive and not increase CPU usage when moving it (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Implemented Breeze styling for movable splitters in QML software, so we can now start porting things to use it. This will eventually result in, for example, resizable sidebars in places where you’d expect for sidebars to be resizable—imagine that! (Ivan Tkachenko, Frameworks 6.4. Link)

Automation & Systematization

Turned a manual test for the Plasma System Tray into an automatic one, so now it actually gets run regularly (Fushan Wen, link)

Added a few autotests for the Plasma Clipboard widget to verify recent fixes (Fushan Wen, 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

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and labor have helped to bring it there! But as we grow, it’s going to be equally important that this stream of labor be made sustainable, which primarily means paying for it. Right now the vast majority of KDE runs on labor not paid for by KDE e.V. (the nonprofit foundation behind KDE, of which I am a board member), and that’s a problem. We’ve taken steps to change this with paid technical contractors — but those steps are small due to growing but still limited financial resources. If you’d like to help change that, consider donating today!

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!