Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

Every week we cover the highlights of what’s happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.

This week features for Plasma 6.5 started to take shape. Day/night appearance changes and digital art are going to be some of the big areas of improvement, so get ready!

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.5.0

You can now configure what rotatable dials on your drawing tablet do! (Joshua Goins, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

When sharing the current Wi-Fi network, its password is now shown as well, so the person you’re sharing it to can easily connect. (Ivan Tkachenko, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.4.3

Improved the accessibility of the Welcome Center app in multiple ways. (Nicolas Fella, link)

KWin’s Magnifier effect now has a maximum magnification level, since going beyond this just turns it into the Zoom effect. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Improved the display of raw bytes in notifications involving file transfers. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

With the new feature to automatically change wallpapers between their light and dark versions, there’s now more than one feature that makes use of the day/night cycle. Accordingly, the place where you configure your location so the system knows what sunrise and sunset timings to use has been moved out of the Night Light page in System Settings and onto its own page. The cycle you set up here will be used for both Night Light and automatic wallpaper switching, and later for automatic theme or color scheme switching too, once either of those are finalized. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1 and link 2)

Screencasts of specific windows now include their titlebars, borders, and shadows. (David Redondo, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.4.3

Fixed an issue that could cause KWin to crash when you Alt+Tab out of certain games. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed an issue that could cause KWin to crash while using a drawing tablet pen when an internal window closes. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a regression that caused window focus to be wrong after switching activities. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a very strange issue that caused apps launched from within Spectacle (for example a video player to view saved screen recordings) to be super duper broken. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Fixed an issue that would prevent Plasma pop-ups from being focusable if a pop-over window from a GTK 4 app was open. (David Edmundson, link)

Using the “Activate and Raise” click setting on Wayland no longer eats clicks while a tooltip is visible. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed an issue that caused window resizing when using a fractional scale factor to be a bit chaotic-looking. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed an issue that caused the Orca screen reader to not work quite right when pressing structural navigation keys repeatedly. (Michael Weghorn, link)

Made the Minimize All Windows widget to work on X11 again. (Marco Martin, link)

The ”Dim Inactive” KWin effect no longer also dims Alt+Tab switchers. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Adapted our code to a Qt change that caused the lock screen to sometimes show the UI and password prompt immediately, rather than only after any interaction. (Marc Payne, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

Fixed an issue that made it impossible to change the background for the SDDM login screen to a new image with the same file name as the old one. (Amy Rose, link)

Fixed an issue that caused authentication prompts to inappropriately reject any already-entered text even if you hadn’t accepted it yet, but rather just because the underlying PAM system was taking a long time. (Secureblue, link)

Frameworks 6.17

Fixed an issue that caused the drag-and-drop menu to sometimes not appear when expected upon dropping files from Dolphin onto the Plasma desktop. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 4 very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 2 last week). Current list of bugs
• 31 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 29 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.4.3

Fixed a memory leak in KWin. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

You can now kioclient mkdir to create a directory going through the KIO system. (Bernardo Gomes Negri, link)

Frameworks 6.17

Slightly improved performance and efficiency for all QtQuick-based KDE apps — including Plasma apps like System Settings, Discover, and Spectacle. (David Edmundson and Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2)

How You Can Help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist!

You can also help us by making a donation! A monetary contribution of any size will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

Friday, 11 July 2025

KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 6.16.0.

This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

New in this version

I have been a long time Plasma Mobile contributor, but I have always had a keen interest in having Linux on my TV! I have noticed that in the past few months, the Plasma Bigscreen project has had some interest from people wanting to contribute, but there have not been any active KDE developers working on the project. Since I have some time off school (having just graduated university), I decided to take a swing at improving the project for a week.

Background 🔗

Plasma Bigscreen is a Plasma-based shell (desktop environment) for TVs and other large displays. It is designed to be used with arrow navigation using remotes or controllers.

I have not been involved with the project in the past so its history is a bit murky to me. From what I know, it was originally developed with Mycroft in mind, which was a open source virtual assistant. They had even developed hardware for it, but unfortunately, the company shut down in recent years. The work by the developers at that time appears to have been sponsored by Blue Systems.

Plasma Bigscreen itself emerged around 2020 and was designed as a “Plasma shell”, in a similar way to Plasma Desktop and Plasma Mobile. Back when development was active, it provided a TV friendly launcher to launch Linux apps, and even had its own “mini-apps”, known as Mycroft Skills. These could be downloaded from the KDE Store. A TV-friendly web browser and media player were also developed for the project. The project itself was released in the Plasma 5 release cycle, but got dropped with Plasma 6 in 2024 because it was not ported in time for the megarelease.

About a year ago, the project was ported to Plasma 6 (and Qt 6), but has not yet received a release since being removed from the Plasma release schedule.

Stepping in 🔗

A few months ago, my friend Seshan started doing some work and opened a few merge requests against the Plasma Bigscreen shell repository. I noticed that there had basically been no activity on the repository since the initial Qt6/Plasma6 port, and the matrix channel had no active developers. I sensed an opportunity…

Housekeeping 🔗

I started with some housekeeping work with the repository. I added a README, and a REUSE license checker to the CI. I then ported the QML library to be a declarative plugin, and removed a bunch of abandoned code folders that were not used anywhere in the codebase.

Merge requests:

• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/111
• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/122

UI 🔗

At this point prior to my work, the shell UI looked like this:

I was digging around some old Breeze Ocean mockups and stumbled across some Bigscreen mockups by Manuel. It seems the original Bigscreen UI did try to follow it, but did not quite get there. I felt inspired to fully complete implementing them.

Homescreen 🔗

I first worked on the homescreen UI. I flattened the layout to reduce visual complexity, removing panel backgrounds and shadows where possible, while adding tooltips for the indicators. I then added an “expanded clock” view for when the user is at the top of application categories (based on the mockups), which shrinks when the user goes down the view. I ported the application lists to use ListView and delegate caching rather than having all elements having their coordinates positioned manually to improve performance. The background now also blurs when it is not the main focus of the UI.

I also added a search view based on KRunner. This allows users to search for the applications they need without needing to manually scroll through the entire application list.

Merge requests:

• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/114
• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/116
• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/118
• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/119
• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/124
• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/126

Settings 🔗

I redesigned the system settings view to have a sidebar with categories, with a simple two-pane look.

The settings modules (KCMs) had a lot of hardcoded UI elements and layouts. I decided to make a small component library to build TV focused UIs (that still look Breeze like), and ported all of the settings modules to it. I moved away from horizontal layouts to vertical layouts for content, and put a heavier emphasis on sidebars for interacting with individual delegates. I think it looks pretty nice:

I ported settings modules to my controls library, and also fixed some issues:

• Display KCM (rewritten with libkscreen backend, as it was otherwise completely broken)
• Sound KCM (ported to new UI)
• KDE Connect KCM (ported to new UI, fixed some state issues)
• Bigscreen KCM (ported to new UI, fix shortcuts, fixed timezone selection)
• Wi-Fi KCM (ported to new UI)

Merge requests:

• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/115 (rework settings app)
• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/129 (controls library)
• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/130 (kdeconnect)
• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/131 (bigscreen settings)
• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/132 (audio)
• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/139 (don’t sort settings modules with bogosort)
• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/145 (displays)

Startup feedback 🔗

The UI feedback for starting an application was broken, so I decided to overhaul it to be something similar to what we have on mobile:

Merge request:

• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/125

Envmanager 🔗

I wrote envmanager as a program in Plasma Mobile that manages shell specific configuration we need in services such as KWin. This avoids the need for distros to ship custom configs to set certain settings that the shell needs. I recently changed Plasma Mobile to use config overlays in order to achieve this, with more details can be found in my other blog post.

Merge requests:

• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/109 (import from Plasma Mobile, by Seshan)
• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/113 (port to overlays)

Trying it out 🔗

In order to try it out (on a TV for realsies, not just on my workstation), I used a Raspberry Pi 5. I flashed postmarketOS onto it, and then manually compiled and installed the Plasma Bigscreen shell.

Note: If you are trying to build and install on postmarketOS yourself, be sure install the dependencies and pass the build flags in this manifest, as they are required: https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/blob/ee4de8c6702a113914d6ed899c88cb9411e75427/packages/plasma-bigscreen/APKBUILD#L57

As a user you can otherwise install plasma-bigscreen from the nightly repo, or use the AUR package on Arch (though I haven’t tried it).

It’s dangling off the HDMI cable, I know

Applications 🔗

In its heyday, Plasma Bigscreen relied on “Mycroft Skills” to provide some media applications such as YouTube and SoundCloud. We do not have that anymore, so I tried out some other Linux applications.

These are some of the ones I tried from Flathub:

• Kodi - Works well with arrow navigation, allows you to manage a local digital library of content
• VacuumTube - Provides the YouTube TV web UI wrapped in an application, works well with arrow navigation
• Jellyfin - I don’t have a Jellyfin server; it launches fine but I don’t think it supports arrow navigation
• SuperTux - Fun game!
• SuperTuxKart - It ran somewhat poorly on the Pi, but playing it with a controller was quite nice!

Of course, we also have KDE applications designed for TV:

• Aura browser
• Plank media player

Controller support 🔗

There is a repository called plasma-remotecontrollers, which contains a daemon that is able to take both game controllers (ex. Xbox) and TV remotes (over CEC on HDMI) and map them to keyboard arrow keys. It also has a settings module to configure the shortcuts.

I was able to successfully test having an Xbox controller connected (with the daemon online), and having it map the arrow buttons to arrow keys on the system. I wasn’t able to however test the CEC support, which would allow buttons on TV remotes (over HDMI) map to arrow keys.

Other contributors 🔗

Seshan and User8395 have also been contributing to the project here and there in the past few weeks, here are some highlights:

• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/127 - (Seshan - Add a UVC viewer app)
• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/117 - (Seshan - Add an “app” to swap session directly from Plasma Desktop)
• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/123 - (Seshan - Make Meta key go to home)
• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/106 - (Seshan - Improve the favorites selector)
• https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-bigscreen/-/merge_requests/147 - (User8395 - Create a new bluetooth KCM)

Unresolved issues 🔗

There is still a lot to work on in the project.

Input 🔗

There isn’t a virtual keyboard to input text with that supports arrow navigation. This is something planned for Plasma Keyboard however, please stay tuned!

The plasma-remotecontrollers’s (TV remote/game controller support) settings module is also not yet properly ported and tested on Bigscreen.

So… it is probably best to still use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse for now, or an air remote.

Application design 🔗

We do not have any framework to design TV-based UIs in KDE. Aura browser and Plank both use Qt Quick Controls and Kirigami, but have a lot of hardcoding and custom controls in order to be usable on a TV. I do have a few TV focused components for building settings modules, but that is a very narrow set of controls.

Goals 🔗

What are the usecases we want to achieve with a TV focused desktop environment? Do we need to also pursue making frontends for various media services? There isn’t a clear direction for the project at the moment, beyond making it a working desktop environment. In the past, this project was heavily focused on Mycroft but that no longer exists.

Getting it released again 🔗

Distributions dropped their respective plasma-bigscreen packages when Plasma 6 rolled out, as it is no longer part of the Plasma release. We need to have the project return to the Plasma release cycle, hopefully starting with Plasma 6.5.

Overall 🔗

I am fairly happy with the work that I was able to produce for Bigscreen last month. I have since returned to working on Plasma Mobile (due to having limited time as a volunteer contributor), but I can still step in and help review merge requests and guide new contributors to the project.

Feel free to join us in the Bigscreen Matrix group #plasma-bigscreen:kde.org!

Today, we released updated versions of the fine-tuned CodeLlama 13B-QML and 7B -QML models. The updated versions include the first skills to complete code for Qt Quick enhancements in Qt 6.9 and Qt 6.10.

As i wrote in the previous post, now the KWallet service has been splitted in a compatibility layer that exposes the old KWallet api, but actually consumes the Secret Service API, provided by default by the old KWallet daemon converted in a secretservice-only provider.

Another pain point is the application used to look inside the wallets, KWalletmanager, which only speaks the KWallet api and looks a bit dated nowdays:

I am working on a new application which goal is strictly to be a client for Secret Service. It can access passwords of any Secret Service provider (being KWallet, Gnome-keyring, KeepassXC, oo7 or whatever else) and should hopefully look a bit more modern and simple, while still being powerful:

Both as a desktop application or a mobile one:

For items imported from KWallet supports editing the values of type “Map” as well:

As well as visualizing “binary” entries (here super censored for obvious reasons

The application can be tested at https://invent.kde.org/mart/kwallets

But has a fundamental problem, for which i need help… Right now is just called “KWallets” which can be kinda confusing with old KWallet and KWalletManager, so it probably needs a new name, any opinion is welcome .

The Amarok Development Squad is happy to announce the immediate availability of Amarok 3.3 "Far Above the Clouds"!

Amarok 3.3.0 is the first version based on Qt6/KF6, corresponding to a decade-sized update of the technological foundations. Additionally, audio engine has been reworked to use GStreamer for playback. Previously, the availability of various features, e.g. ReplayGain and visualiser, was dependent on the Phonon backend in use, an issue that became even more evident with Qt6 Phonon backends. This has now been remedied: The reworked audio engine provides unified feature set for all users and should provide a solid and future-proof sonic experience for years to come. Notable improvements have also landed to the database system: improved character set support helps with e.g. emojis in podcast descriptions and other very exotic symbols, date handling has been improved ('year 2038 problem'), and various other potential and actual database-related issues have been fixed.

Amarok 3.3 arrives approximately 15 months after the initial Qt5/KF5 version 3.0 and 5 months after the final Qt5/KF5 version 3.2.2. Although there have been a number of major changes, they are mostly technical, and their effect on the user experience is relatively minor. Therefore, the version released now is 3.3.0, with some 3.3.x bugfix releases to be expected in near future. A new major version ('Amarok 4') will be released later, after more extensive work on the user interface and other aspects of the software has been carried out.

Changes since 3.2.2

FEATURES:

• Audio engine has been reworked to use GStreamer instead of Phonon

CHANGES:

• Qt5/KF5 support has been dropped
• Update database character set to allow full utf-8 values (BR 462268)
• Apply default pre-gain when ReplayGain is active and use fallback value if no ReplayGain data is available for a track
• Clear out some of the now-discontinued Last.fm radio functionalities and partially replace by opening relevant Last.fm pages
• Remove TagLib extras support (RealMedia and Audible files)

BUGFIXES:

• Handle volume better and avoid resets on track changes (BR 506427)
• Fix year 2038 problem for various dates saved in database (BR 426807)
• Default to not allow compiling without embedded database (BR 502777)
• Prevent concurrent scan result processings from taking place to avoid potential database issues
• Partially re-enable cue file support

The git repository statistics between 3.2.0 and 3.3.0 are as follows:
Tuomas Nurmi: 113 commits, +3681, -3101
l10n daemon script: 92 commits, +85094, -89109
Kunda Ki: 1 commit, +4, -11
Carl Schwan: 1 commit, +1, -1

Getting Amarok

In addition to source code, Amarok is available for installation from many distributions' package repositories, which are likely to get updated to 3.3.0 soon, as well as the flatpak available on flathub.

Packager section

You can find the tarball package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Tuomas Nurmi's GPG key.

I have released 25.04.3 I have upgraded the QT6 content snap to 6.9! Fixed a bug in kde-neon* extensions with cmake prefix path.

New snaps!

Audex: A CD ripping application.

GCompris – An excellent childrens education application

Labplot – Scientific plotting

Digikam – 8.7.0 with exiftool bug fixed https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501424

Krita – 5.2.11 – Excellent Graphic art platform ( compares to Photoshop )

kgraphviewer – Graphiz .dot file viewer

I am happy to report my arm is mostly functional! Unfortunately, maintaining all these snaps is an enormous amount of work, with time I don’t have! Please consider a donation for the time I should be spending job hunting / getting a website business off the ground. Thank you for your consideration!

• GoFundMe Donate
• Patreon Donate
• GitHub Donate
• DonorBox Donate

A new version of Plasma Camera and Plasma Settings have been released

These are the independent software releases of July 2025.

Plasma Camera is a newcomer this time around, having been ported to a libcamera backend. Read Andrew's blog or Devin's blog to learn more about it!

Plasma Settings gained the ability to show all settings modules (for all platforms, such as desktop) under a toggle. It now supports the ability to show an "Apply" button for settings modules that do not want settings to save automatically. The header being misaligned on category pages is now fixed.

Please note: most Plasma Mobile software is now shipped under the Plasma or KDE Gear release cycles.

Source code

The tarballs have been signed by Devin Lin 23919AE71103C02137422E3C5E023F97C5BB4C13.

Tuesday, 8 July 2025. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.3.6.

Plasma 6.3 was released in February 2025 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

This release adds two months’ worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:

The last maintenance release of the 25.04 series is out with fixes to the volume and transform effects as well as some issues with guides.