This week in Plasma: 6.2 has been released!

This Week in Plasma 3 Minutes

And I’d say it’s a pretty good release! As with all large sets of changes, there are a couple of regressions we’re tracking, particularly around the areas of external monitor brightness and multi-screen performance. They are being actively investigated. Other than those, so far all the issues have been fairly minor, requiring people to jump through various hoops to experience them. We’re still working on fixing them, of course! I’ll be writing up another post soon on these issues, discussing how they snuck into the final release, and what we can learn from the experience.

But in the meantime, here’s the Plasma team’s work from this week:

Notable UI Improvements

Removed some unintentional extra padding around everything on System Settings’ Touchpad page (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.1. Link):

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed a regression in Plasma that caused pop-ups of widgets on a Plasma panel to get positioned partially off screen, but only if their parent panel was very small and positioned against on the left or top screen edge (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed a regression in the new “control all screens’ brightness” feature that caused the brightness slider for external screens to get duplicated with certain screens (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed two minor window focus regressions caused by an intentional change in KWin’s multi-monitor focus behavior (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.1. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a porting regression that caused the virtual desktop switcher OSD to not appear when it should have (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed a porting regression that caused the first entry in the clipboard to temporarily not be removable after editing it (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed a porting regression that caused auto-mounted encrypted disks to mount normally as expected, but not show up correctly in Plasma’s Disks & Devices widget (Bohdan Onofriichuk, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed three Plasma crashes affecting the System Tray and Disks & Devices widget under various circumstances (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.2.1. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash in brightness-related code (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed a bug in our KPipeWire library (which lives in Plasma) that caused screen recordings in Spectacle using the default VP9 video codec to be cut off at the end on slower systems (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed a bug that caused configuration pages of System Monitor widgets to not be scrollable when needed (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed an unusual bug that caused the system to fail to log out within the first 50 seconds after logging in, but only when the splash screen was disabled (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.1. Link 1 and link 2)

System Settings’ Wallpapers page now has a visible title as expected (Méven Car, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

The Baloo file indexer service no longer tries to pointlessly index the content of .obj 3D model files (Someone going by the pseudonym “Archaeopteryx Lithographica”, Frameworks 6.8. Link)

Other bug information of note:

Performance & Technical

Further optimized Discover’s launch speed (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.3.0 Link)

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, work on fixing Plasma 6.2 regressions!

If you’re an enthusiastic user, don’t sweat them and upgrade anyway. It’s a fantastic release.

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.

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21 thoughts on “This week in Plasma: 6.2 has been released!”

  1. I don’t subscribe to any episodic content except “this week” and I must say by Friday I’m really looking forward to it landing in my inbox. Always something of interest without fail.

    Liked by 1 person

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  3. Does KDE has a roadmap? What new will be in 6.3? Strange, that I could not find any goals what should be implemented/fixed in nearest future.

    https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15329 – this one for example, it is very hard to live on a 2-motitor setup, when each startup you have to move all opened windows to the right monitor and right position…

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    2. If negotiations are stuck, it should be forked then in the name of the success of the whole KDE project and people that using it. Why all the waiting for?

      I did not know, that with KDE it is not possible to login to corporate networks:
      No network config, if you have corporate LDAP login and cannot connect your laptop to a Wifi, you’re stuck

      No corporate usage possible = no users, no possible donations or hired stuff to work on KDE…

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    3. I have been using KDE/Plasma together with my company’s Active Directory account for many years.

      In order to add the computer to the Active Directory, you have to manually adjust some configurations, but the login then works without any problems.

      Of course, I also log in via sddm. So that I can enter my login name in sddm, I only had to set the MaximumUid and MinimumUid parameters in the config to 99999, for example. This makes an input field for the login name appear in sddm.

      And I have been able to do my daily work perfectly well with KDE/Plasma for many years now.

      Liked by 1 person

    4. And I am also connected to the Wi-Fi in the company. Even if there is no network available, for example in my home office or outside the company, I can still log in via the cache. This works via sssd, regardless of the desktop interface used.

      Liked by 1 person

  5. On medium/cheap laptops with Intel iGPUs, Plasma 6.2 cannot be used at all, it suffers from heavy slowness and lagging in mouse movements and animations, I’m sure something heavy was added to this release which rendered the whole desktop unusable, I love KDE Plasma so I’m waiting for any soon solution and don’t want to be forced to jump to that XFCE.

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    2. Don’t wait – do your part and raise a bug report. Every one get triaged within a few days so this will appear on the radar and the importance assessed. Make sure to point out that it was running smoothly on the same hardware prior to 6.2.

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  7. I am still having crashes in Plasma 6.2 (just came back from KDE 5 in the hope it would be much more stable) Unfortunately, they appear to be impossible to report because during the system collecting the information the system freezes and I have to shut the device. Is there, anyway, to make the crash info to survive the reboot. Crahes occur on wayland and x, but much more on wayland.

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    1. You could try to ssh into your system from a different computer and check the debug output, when it freezes.

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  9. As expected and warned, the battery icon is shown charging indefinitely when the battery is old and does not reach 100%, just the umpteenth bug courtesy of nate’s sloppiness. Maybe someone will fix it in a few years, good job team.

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