This week in Plasma: Stabilization for 6.2

This week I and many other major Plasma contributors are at Akademy, planning the future and having many fruitful in-person discussions! As a result, probably next week’s post will be a bit light. This week though, lots of pre-Akademy changes got merged, most of them bug-fixes and performance improvements scheduled for Plasma 6.2. We want 6.2 to be super duper stable, and are putting in the work to ensure this goal is reached!

In addition, we merged a few final late-breaking features that had been under development for months and were deemed stable enough — likely the last ones before the hard feature freeze in a few days. Check it out!

Late-Breaking New Features

You can now rename audio devices! Additionally, you can now choose the technical data source used to generate default names for audio devices that you don’t choose to manually rename, which helps for hardware like mixer tables which show up as like 50 devices such that renaming each one individually would be a big pain in the butt (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

You can now click/double-click on .ovpn VPN profile files to configure a new VPN (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

You can now place files in ~/Templates and they will appear as templates in the “Create New…” menu that appears in various places, including Plasma’s Desktop and Dolphin (Antti Savolainen, Frameworks 6.7. Link)

Notable UI Improvements

When copying image data to the clipboard, the Clipboard widget now always shows a preview of the image, instead of sometimes, in a random-seeming manner, showing a symbolic icon instead (Noah Davis, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

In Discover’s rating preview carousel thingy that provides an overview of an app’s rating including top reviews, it will no longer show reviews that have been voted down more than up (Aleix Pol Gonzales, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

In Plasma’s Networks widget, the button to create a Wi-Fi hotspot now uses the correct icon (Darshan Phaldesai, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed an issue that could cause pop-ups for widgets on a Plasma panel to be resized to either their original size or else a much smaller size after the screen configuration changed (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)

Searching for locations with umlauts in their names now works as expected in Plasma’s Weather Report widget (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)

When using the “Toggle Touchpad” global shortcut to turn your touchpad on or off, if you restart the machine with the touchpad disabled, then the next time you start it up again, the state will be correctly reported such that you can press the shortcut only once to turn the touchpad on again (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)

System Settings no longer crashes every time you close the “Login Screen (SDDM)” page while on its Behavior sub-page (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)

Fixed two somewhat common ways that Plasma could crash with certain multi-screen setups on X11 (Méven Car, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when you drag a widget from the Widget Explorer over an Activity Manager widget (David Redondo, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Moving the pointer over tasks in Plasma’s Task Manager widget no longer causes their thumbnail previews to immediately disappear some of the time, depending on which direction you moved it in and your panel’s position on the screen (David Redondo, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Clearing the search field in Plasma’s Kickoff Application Launcher widget no longer unexpectedly launches the top item shown in the last search (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The “Charging Rate” sensor in the System Monitor app and its widgets of no longer shows a negative number while the battery is in fact charging — only while it’s discharging (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a visual glitch in System Settings’ Region and Language page that caused the selected item on the Binary Dialect sub-page to have unreadable text when not using a custom accent color (Méven Car, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a bug that caused animated cursors to only play their animation while the cursor was being moved when the system was falling back to or forced into using software cursors (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Implemented a workaround for the issue that causes the Touchpad and other pages in System Settings to sometimes break when being navigated to after first accessing another page. The root cause is still under investigation, since it seems to be very tricky and complicated (Albert Astals Cid, Frameworks 6.6. Link)

Sharing a file to your device via KDE Connect no longer breaks after the first time you do it until the app you shared the file from is restarted (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.6. Link)

Fixed an issue that would make impossible to use the “Restore” functionality for trashed files or folders moved by an app to the trash using absolute file paths (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.6. Link)

When Discover is maximized, it now remembers the window size it was displayed at before, so when you un-maximize it, it returns to that size (Eamonn Rea and Joshua Goins, Plasma 6.2.0 with Frameworks 6.7. Link 1 and link 2)

Other bug information of note:

Notable in Performance & Technical

Fixed an issue in Discover that could, under certain circumstances, cause the app to freeze right after being launched (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Optimized search performance in Discover so that it does less unnecessary work (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Did some performance optimization for KFilePlacesItem which should improve startup speed for anything using the Places panel (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.7. 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.