This week in Plasma: inhibiting inhibitions and more!

This is a big one, folks. Plasma 6.2’s soft feature freeze is now in effect, which means the last few features have just been merged! Now we’ll have six weeks of heavy bug-fixing before the final release in October. If you’re an industrious sort, the time to live on git master and report bugs is now! Current git master is completely suitable for daily driving.

And we’ve already been focusing on QA for a while, so new bug reports take priority — both triaging them and fixing them. Over the past few months, we’ve succeeded in dropping plasmashell’s total number of bug reports to 1022, the lowest in several years. And the number of unconfirmed bug reports is currently down to 301, the lowest since late 2015! Triaging and fixing bugs is a priority, and we’re promptly triaging all new Plasma new bug reports daily. Our goal is to push the number of unconfirmed bug reports under 200 by the end of September.

So please do submit bug reports for any issues you encounter; it’s not a black hole. If you’ve complained about bugs on social media recently and haven’t reported them on https://bugs.kde.org, fix that today! Do it! Do it now!

…But first check out the final Plasma 6.2 features; I think they’re pretty awesome. It’s gonna be a big release, full of useful stuff!

Notable New Features

It’s now possible to block apps from inhibiting sleep and screen lock, if you don’t like the fact that they do so (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

Newly installed Plasma widgets are now shown at the top of the grid view and badged with “New!” for one hour, so it’s easy for you to find them right after installing them (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

While choosing a custom image for a user avatar on System Settings’ Users page, you can now crop the image if needed (someone going by the Pseudonym “Kuneho Cottonears”, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

Added support for 7-day weather forecasts and “chance of precipitation” data for BBC UK Met weather stations shown in Plasma’ Weather widget (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

Discover now gently guides you in the direction of writing better reviews for non-proprietary apps (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

Added a yearly notification to ask for donations; see this week’s earlier post for more details (TL;DR: optional, once per year, you can permanently disable it) (me: Nate Graham Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The plasma-apply-wallpaperimage tool now has a --fill-mode option, mirroring the existing GUI option for this, but now in a scriptable form (Heitor Augusto Lopes Nunes, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Notable UI Improvements

Due to popular demand, KWin’s Overview effect once again shows a linearized representation of two-dimensional virtual desktop layouts (e.g. 2×2, 3×3, etc) on the primary view, rather than hiding them entirely (Blazer Silving, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Plasma’s System Tray now uses a better grid layout for the expanded view that leaves more space for text, which is especially important for languages like German and Russian. The new layout saves space, too (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

The settings for KWin’s colorblindness correction effect now live in the logical place where you’d expect to find them: on System Settings’ Accessibility page! (Thomas Duckworth, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

Overhauled the UI of System Settings’ Accessibility page in a lot of little ways to make it actually be more… accessible! (Thiago Sueto, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Plasma’s “Minimize All” widget now only minimizes and unminimizes windows on the current virtual desktop and activity, rather than all windows everywhere (Christoph Wolk, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

If you enter global edit mode, and then from there enter a panel’s own edit mode, closing the panel’s configuration window now simply returns you to the global edit mode, rather than exiting from that too (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The error message shown when manually installing a Plasma widget fails is now more descriptive, and tells you the actual error so you can troubleshoot it (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Made a pass over many areas of Plasma and System Settings to align text and labels with our Human Interface Guidelines’ best practices (Christoph Wolk, Plasma 6.2.0. Too many merge requests to list TBH, so check them all out here!)

Dialog windows throughout KDE software have new icons again — this time they look nicer and more Breeze-styled (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.6. Link):

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed a nasty issue that could cause corruption in files on SFTP servers that were edited by opening them from Dolphin in an app and then saving changes (Ser Freeman, kio-extras 24.12.0. Link)

Changing the system’s Global Theme now also changes the colors of any recolorable GTK apps, just like you’d expect (Michael Weghorn, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)

Performing a multi-finger touch swipe/gesture on your touchscreen no longer messes up Plasma and gets it caught in a weird limbo state (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)

Fixed a recent regression in Plasma’s desktop file/folder view that could cause items to snap back to their previous locations after being dragged somewhere else (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Job progress notifications shown by Plasma no longer let any buttons’ text get cut off in languages where words and phrases are long; now, the popups expand horizontally a bit to make room (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed two issues in Plasma’s Emoji Selector app seemingly caused during the Plasma 6 port that caused it to lose its prior selection highlight effect, and always copy the first item in the search results view rather than the selected one (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Substantially reduced the glitchiness of the tooltips for items in the expanded view of Plasma’s System Tray (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a glitch that could cause the Maliit virtual keyboard to be mis-positioned when using any vertical panels (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

When Plasma’s Folder View widget is placed on a panel, its popup can now be resized to smaller than its default size (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

It’s no longer possible to break System Settings quite terribly by opening a “Get New [thing]” window and then closing System Settings’ own main window (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 6.6. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 2 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 3 as last week). Current list of bugs
• 33 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 36 last week). Current list of bugs
• 149 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week. Full list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Substantially improved performance in Discover in multiple ways: launch time, time to load the UI, time to load icons, and smoothness of scrolling through long lists (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, and link 5)

Discover now behaves more sensibly and only shows one authentication prompt when asked to update multiple Flatpak apps in an environment with hardened security for Flatpaks, as in openSUSE distros (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Installing a font now places it, by default, in a standardized location (e.g. ~/.local/share/fonts/rather than the legacy location (~/.fonts/), which means that sandboxed apps will be able to find and use them as expected (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. 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

So yeah, like I said, please test Plasma from current git master and open bug reports about issues you find. Another path is to help triage bug reports that the first crowd will be opening. Ask for more information, make them actionable, move them where needed! And of course, help fix triaged and confirmed bug reports.

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! Or consider donating instead! That helps too.