Plasma 6.2 will be released in just three days! In the end we did revert the notification changes I mentioned last week, so users of Plasma 6.2 won’t experience any new issues with notifications. The list of verified 6.2 regressions is extremely small, with most being low importance. We will of course eventually get them fixed anyway! But they aren’t release blockers.
Notable New Features
Distros can now customize the set of apps shown on Discover’s homepage in the “Editor’s Choice” section (Jarred Wilson, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)
Notable UI Improvements
We’ve returned to the older style of default audio device naming from Plasma 6.1, plus a few extra heuristics to hopefully make it even better when using PipeWire. And don’t worry, the new feature to rename devices remains present (Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Discover now only shows the total size of available updates once it’s finished checking for them, so the number is always accurate and doesn’t bounce around (Soumyadeep Ghosh, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Fixed the most common Plasma crash on X11, which was often encountered when waking up a sleeping monitor (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed a common case where KWin could crash when using Overview to search for stuff (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed two a somewhat common seemingly random Plasma crashes (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)
Fixed an issue that could, under certain circumstances, cause KWin to freeze when connecting or disconnecting an external monitor to a laptop (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed a bug that could cause System Monitor sensors configured with certain combinations of faces and sensors to become permanently invisible! (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Improved the robustness of Plasma’s startup code, so that it doesn’t fail to launch when the kactivitymanagerd daemon is slow (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed an issue that could cause animations to get stuck on certain screens with the Adaptive Sync feature turned on (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Removed the animations from Plasma’s Pager widget because they were too subtle to notice most of the time, and triggered a Qt bug that wrecks laptop battery life with auto-hidden panels. The Qt bug is under investigation, but at least now you should hit it less often (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed one of the bugs that could cause icon positions on the desktop to get reset after monitors turned off and back on again. This may also fix a very common similar bug where positions get reset when the resolution changes; that’s still being verified. And of course there may be other bugs with positioning as well, but this was one of them and it’s fixed now! Others are under Investigation (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed KWin’s “Toggle Raise and Lower” functionality so that it does in fact lower the window again (Jarek Janik, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed a regression that caused the title of any components using Kirigami.OverlaySheet to be vertically mis-positioned (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 6.7. Link)
Changing regional settings for your user is now more reliable in the case where your distro or its installer set the value of all of the LC_* properties at a systemwide level — as apparently happens on Ubuntu (Han Young, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Made sure that pointer acceleration in XWayland games with screen scaling is the same as in native Wayland apps (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)
Other bug information of note:
- 2 Very high priority Plasma bug (up from 1 last week). Current list of bugs
- 30 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 33 last week). Current list of bugs
- 137 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week. Full list of bugs
How You Can Help
You know what? Have a rest. It’s not feasible to work all the time; breaks are important too. Everyone’s been working so hard on Plasma 6.2, and I think the results are going to be great. Make sure not to neglect your mental health! Rest when you need it. Were all humans with physical bodies.
Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover additional 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.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Very cool Nate, huge respect my man appreciate your work. KDE is slowly but very surely becoming the best thing in the world. We will get there brick by brick, we will never give up and we will succeed. Nothing can stop the inevitable.
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Fantastic progress as always. Honestly I’m as excited by the weekly nibbling away at the number of 15 minute bugs as anything. Maybe you’ll have to start a new category of ’30 minute bugs’ soon!
Asking here because I’m not sure who else would know –
@ Nate do you have inside info on ‘Holding key down activates accent picker?’ I remembered seeing this in the blog and did some searching on how to activate it. Seems it never got quite finished. Any idea if this is dead in the water or ‘might happen soon-ish?’
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Cool, can’t wait to try 6.2 myself!
Fixing bugs in multi-screen setups having its usual entry in almost every post means devs do actually use them and are trying to polish the overall experience.
On a sidenote, I think Spectacle might need a way to inform user if screen recording has failed to start. I have an old install of KDE Neon (user branch) — regularly updated — on a quite old Haswell laptop where Spectacle seems to not do anything when trying to record screen and leaves user puzzled about the reason of such behaviour.
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Great work as always.
@Nate – Any news on the ‘holding key displays accent selection menu’ feature that was mentioned in a previous update?
It seems to have stalled but I wondered if you had any inside info – is it likely we will see this any time soon?
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Probably not soon. But I do expect it to show up eventually, as part of the input goal.
The issue with the feature was that it wasn’t really compatible with the world of input methods. So using it prevented you from also using a virtual keyboard or IBus. It’s a major limitation of the current input method ecosystem, and something we do plan to work on for the input goal.
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Thanks Nate, I appreciate the update.
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Thanks so much for fixing the KDE Connect Android 14 bug, Nate. I had just upgraded to Pixel 9 Pro XL this week and it kept crashing. Searched the issue and saw it had been assigned. Did not expect the fix so quickly. All is working now. Great job!
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Nate,
Plasma 6.2 (which is amazing, I’m in the 6.1.90 Arch builds) is Tuesday (yay!)
My question is: what is the status of https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477939? It’s still active and present. I’ve actually reverted to X11 as my default because I much prefer having the “triple split” panel that I have on the top of my screens.
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Still blocked on the need for Wayland protocol changes before it can be fixed.
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Yes! Glad that you’re mentioning this. Open source is only fun when we are feeling good in our bodies and minds. Otherwise why bother?
But super awesome! Seems like monitors going to sleep seem to be a huge edge case. Which is why making an OS must be harder than it looks.
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Yeah, it’s all about the edge cases; pretty much just the 80/20 principle in action. 80% ain’t bad, and you can get there quickly, but the remaining 20% will take you decades, especially because user expectations are a moving target.
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Hey Nate,
I changed the author name of TWIKA to Carl Schwan mentioning all co-autors below. Is that ok with you?
BTW, can I contact you directly somehow? Mastodon, Matrix, Signal, whatever?
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As I’m primarily using Plasma from a laptop, I thought my favorite Plasma 6.2 feature would be native brightness control for externally connected monitors. But if the fixed bug about with resetting desktop icons is the same bug that I’m experiencing from time to time, I’d be over the moon!
Can’t wait for 6.2 to come to my rolling release distro the coming week!
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tumbleweed delivered it last night. Nothing happened, everything works as before. Very very nice. Thank you so much KDE!
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KDE neon, seems the 6.2 is stable and working, but what does “Error loading Applet: package org.kde.plasma.quicklaunch does not exist.” mean and where is my quicklaunch widget in main panel? :sniff:
Is this deliberate EOL of the widget or just needs some dev work to become available also in 6.2? Or it got moved to some new package which wasn’t pulled as dependency in neon and I can add it manually?
Also Kate seems to not offer anymore session picker as status icon, but I guess I can live without that, I use one session 99% of time any way.
But the quicklaunch is sort of essential for me. Argh. 🙂 If anyone knows what happened, let me know – if I should start figuring new workflow or if there’s chance to recover it.
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Ah, seems `kdeplasma-addons` and `plasma-widgets-addons` were the packages I was missing, now let’s hope the quicklaunch will catch up on old config after restart and show as expected. 🙂
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I’m experiencing the same issue on Arch with a 6th generation Intel CPU. The Plasma desktop feels sluggish, especially when moving icons. When I use a busy or colorful wallpaper with many elements, KWin becomes laggy and slow, but it performs well with simple, solid wallpapers. I’ve tried different themes like Klassy, Breeze, and the old Plastik theme, but none of them improved the speed. Plasma 6.1 was much faster. My setup includes an Intel(R) Core™ i5-6500 CPU (4 cores) running at 3.60 GHz and an integrated Intel HD Graphics 530 GPU at 1.05 GHz.
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