This week in Plasma: all screens, all the time

This Week in Plasma 4 Minutes

We continued fixing bugs and making UI improvements this week. You’ll notice a good many of them are about screens somehow! Ah, screens, the magical windows to our computers. They are amazing… and they suck. So many graphics driver bugs and hardware quirks to work around, so many edge cases to handle… and so that was a large part of what we spent doing for you, dear reader! Because getting all this screen stuff right has a massive impact on quality.

And of course there was a lot of other work too!

Notable UI Improvements

There’s a new behavior when dragging things out of a window that’s not the top one in the stacking order: the window with the dragged content remains where it is during the drag, instead of immediately jumping to the front (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Kickoff, Kicker, and other launcher menus now have a “Help” category, and the Help Center app appears there instead of among other top-level categories (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.3 and KHelpCenter 24.12. Link 1, link 2, and link 3):

Added a touch-friendly UI for the clipboard widget that appears only when in touch mode (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Fixed a case where some system components’ default shortcuts all wanted to use Meta+0 and interfered with one another. Now they all use different shortcuts:

  • “Zoom to Actual Size” remains Meta+0
  • “Manually Invoke Action on Current Clipboard” and “Activate Task Manager Entry 10” no longer have a default shortcut set

(Zhangzhi Hu, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

WireGuard VPNs are now considered VPNs by the Networks widget, and labeled and grouped accordingly (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Multi-instance or multi-process Flatpak apps are now grouped together and shown as only one app on System Monitor’s Applications page (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.3.0. Link):

SDDM themes that are actually just symlinks to other themes are now filtered out of the relevant page in System Settings (Bruno Ivan, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Capped the maximum width of the Bluetooth file transfer error dialog so it can’t be ridiculously wide (Zhangzhi Hu, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Added Breeze icons for Typst files (MV Puccino, Frameworks 6.8. Link)

A bunch of symbolic Breeze icons that were inappropriately symbolic-but-colorful are now monochrome to better match all the other monochrome symbolic icons (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.8. Link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug that could cause KWin to freeze when plugging in a Valve Index VR headset when there are no other screens enabled (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.2. Link)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when interacting with connected storage devices in certain ways (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.2.2. Link)

Fixed a bug that would cause the positions of recently-renamed desktop files to not be saved to the config file correctly (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.2.2. Link). And on this subject, we’re currently deep into the process of fixing a related bug that causes icons to get scrambled when some (but not all) screens are turned off. Not for this week, but maybe next week!

Fixed a set of regressions that caused System Settings’ main window to not remember its size correctly (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.2.2 with Frameworks 6.8. Link)

Fixed a recent regression that made certain styles of user avatar image not get applied properly on System Settings’ Users page (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.3. Link)

Spectacle no longer fails to save MP4-formatted screen recordings some of the time (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.2.3. Link)

You can now do a rectangular region screencast on any screen in a multi-screen setup, not just the left-most one (David Redondo, Plasma 6.2.3. Link)

The “Maximum time before updates” setting for grid-style System Monitor widgets now works (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.2.3. Link)

Worked around a quirk of certain HDR-capable screens screens that caused them to leave HDR move whenever any other display settings were changes (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.3. Link)

The “Forget all” menu item of Task Manager Task context menus now succeeds at forgetting abstract resources like URLs (Jin Liu, Plasma 6.2.3. Link)

Made it more reliable to save custom names given to audio devices (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.3. Link)

Fixed a case where the ksystemstats background service that provides information to System Monitor and its widgets’ could crash due to a recent change in Qt (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Fixed a case where Plasma and other KDE apps could crash when ejecting a CD (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.8. Link)

When your user account is slightly misconfigured and does not define a templates directory, the “Create New” menu does no longer weirdly populates itself with the entire contents of your home folder (Benjamin Gonzalez, Frameworks 6.8. Link)

Fixed an issue that could cause the setting to govern notification sound level to not appear as expected (Harald Sitter, Pulseaudio-Qt 1.6.1. Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause the pointer’s target to get sort of stuck after dragging things until after the first click following the completion of the drag. This was commonly seen when re-arranging Task Manager entries: if you failed to click once after dragging an app, the next drag would target the preciously-dragged app instead of the one you wanted (David Edmundson, Qt 6.8.1. Link)

Other bug information of note:

Performance & Technical

Improved the reliability of the “remember for next time” feature in the screen recording source chooser window (David Redondo, Plasma 6.3. Link)

Reduces a source of slowness in the Task Manager widget when faced with windows that have hundreds or thousands of characters in their titles (Jin Liu, Plasma 6.2.3. Link)

The Night Light feature now tints the screen in a colorimetrically correct way when not using ICC profiles (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

It’s now possible to use Plasma scripting to change panels’ opacity levels or what screen they appear on (Heitor Augusto Lopes Nunes and Devin Lin, Plasma 6.3.0. Link 1 and link 2)

How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, keep on working to fix Plasma 6.2 regressions! We’ve got ’em on the run, and this is our chance to finish them off!

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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Published by Nate

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8 thoughts on “This week in Plasma: all screens, all the time”

  2. Hi Nate,

    Do you think there will always be a residue of very high priority and 15 minute bugs at around the current level or do you think they can get whittled down further? Reason I ask is that they seem to be appearing as fast as they are fixed these days (although they’ve come down a lot in the past.)

    This isn’t a negative criticism, by the way.. software developer myself so I understand the nature of the beast. Just looking for you intuition as someone who is much more closely associated with the project than I am as to where it might go.

    Great work, by the way. (@Nate and all who contribute.) 👍

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  4. If you can pass along (or take credit if it was you!) – the whole family and I *really* like the user avatar selection in the Users section in Plasma. My daughter thinks the dog is really cute, and my wife thought it was really nice that I set up her account with books, since she’s an avid reader in her spare time.

    It sounds like a silly little thing, but for home usage and helping folks feel comfortable while using a computer, the friendly and pretty user icons – combined with the ability to choose your accent color – really help make things feel “at home” and less intimidating. Thanks to whoever put those together!

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  5. The Topic this week is just what I have struggling with last few days. My Wayland after waking from sleep is sad to look at: https://discuss.kde.org/t/wayland-session-is-fuzzy-zig-zag-noise-after-wake-up-from-sleep/24489/2 😦

    Since you are The Guru of all Gurus – can you help me with this one?

    Should I write a Bug Report?

    P.s. I started studying chemistry in Helsinki University in 1995, and a four years earlier a student named Linus Torvalds created a think called Linux 1.0…but it took years before I first heard of such thing (Linux)… and he personally named his invention as FreeX… but a colleague of Linus changed it Linux… without asking him.

    So it could have been that we all would use FreeX today.

    P.s P.s. Thanks for sharing the link to the old avatars – I really like some of them (especially Listening,NotMe and TV) – I think I will use one of them.

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    1. That definitely looks like a GPU driver bug, and I’m unfortunately not knowledgeable about those. I’d recommend opening a bug report about it for KWin.

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  6. Sorry, I need to correct what I wrote about origin of Linux…

    Linus Torvalds did not originally name his kernel as FreeX as I wrote – but instead as FreaX (he was a young student) – and therefore there is a logical explanation why his colleague changed the name… I sorry for the wrong information.

    But still… if there would have not been his colleague… we all would be using FreaX instead of Linux….

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