This week in Plasma: polishing like mad

The core Plasma team has entered full-on bug-fixing mode until Plasma 6.2.1, and what a week of bug-fixes it was! We’re nailing regressions reported in the beta release as they appear, as well as older bugs we didn’t manage to get to yet. I’m incredibly impressed with the team and their tremendous work this week!

In addition, a few features and UI changes postponed from Plasma 6.2 have started to land in 6.3.

Notable New Features

Plasma’s Widget Explorer sidebar now gives you the opportunity to remove all instances of a widget, which can help when you have a stuck widget hidden somewhere (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.3.0. Link):

Notable UI Improvements

With multiple screens showing wallpaper slideshows, the transition times for each screen’s slideshow are now synced so they happen at the same moment (Sebastian Meyer, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Loosened the criteria for mouse button re-binding, so for example you can now swap the “Back” and “Middle Click” buttons (Paul Dann, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

The Emoji Selector window now remembers its window position (on X11) and size (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

For notifications that you can pause, the “Pause” button now becomes a “Resume” button after you press it, instead of being checkable (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

In Plasma’s Networks widget, networks you’re not connected to no longer have Configure buttons, because clicking on them didn’t actually do anything useful anyway (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

The checkboxes on System Settings’ Bluetooth page have been replaced with switches, because they’re for instant-apply settings (Christoph Wolk, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug that could cause System Settings to crash when leaving its Wallpaper page (Méven Car, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause Plasma to crash under certain circumstances when applying certain global themes (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a case where plasma-browser-integration-host (the process that communicates with web browsers that have Plasma Browser Integration installed) could crash when windows were closed (Méven Car, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Closing a Plasma widget while a tooltip for one of its UI elements is open no longer causes the tooltip to remain visible and awkwardly jump to the panel itself; now the tooltip also disappears as you would expect. This also fixes a related crash (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a bug that could cause the logout process to get stuck on a black screen on X11 (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Moving a window to another virtual desktop using a method that does not switch to that desktop no longer leaves no window focused on the current desktop (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a bug that caused real-fake-session-restore to not work properly on Wayland (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The footer on Discover’s updates page no longer sometimes gets visually broken (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

When configuring Plasma’s Digital Clock widget to show seconds and using 24-hour time, the time display no longer gets cut off on narrow vertical panels (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed an issue that could cause Plasma’s edit mode to misbehave in strange ways when there are widgets on the desktop and auto-hide panels (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Plasma’s “Minimize All Windows” widget no longer sometimes fails to restore them on Wayland; now this always works (Christoph Wolk, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

System Settings once again remembers its window size, position (on X11), and maximization state as expected (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

On X11, you can now open the color scheme editor on System Settings’ Colors page more than once (Albert Astals Cid, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed the “two clicks to rename” feature on the Plasma desktop when using systemwide double-click mode so that it works properly (Christoph Wolk, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a bug that caused it to be impossible to change power profiles in the Plasma widget under certain circumstances. There may be other such bugs too BTW; this only fixed one of them (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

KWin’s global “Move Mouse to Focus” shortcut now does something more sensible on Wayland by moving the pointer to the focused window instead of the top-left corner of the screen (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The Audio Volume widget can once again display its complex view (rather than a dumb giant icon) when placed in an extremely thick panel (Christoph Wolk, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Made it possible to translate four labels on System Settings’ Touchpad page which were previously untranslatable and hence always shown in English (Victor Ryzhykh, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Plasma’s feature to sync your keyboard’s LED color with the system’s accent color (where supported) can now be permanently disabled if you don’t use it or like it (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

When using an auto-hide Plasma panel, it can no longer be accidentally opened invisibly while in KWin’s Overview effect, which would also cause it to briefly get stuck open after leaving Overview (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Plasma’s Power and Battery widget no longer sometimes mis-labels batteries on systems with removable batteries or multiple batteries (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a bug that caused some Plasma widgets’ pop-ups to not have their top corners rounded as intended (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Throughout QtQuick-based KDE software, pressing a keyboard’s “Show Menu” key now opens the menu under the focused item if there is one, rather than always opening it under the cursor (Evgeny Chesnokov, Frameworks 6.7. Link)

Throughout KDE software, the “Upload to Imgur” sharing plugin now only lets you try to upload file types that Imgur actually supports (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.7. Link)

The informational tooltips seen all over the place in System Settings that you can access by clicking on a little button with the info symbol on it no longer flickers between visible and invisible if it opens right under the cursor (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 6.7. Link)

Global shortcuts for activating Kickoff no longer break if you restart Plasma with plasmashell --replace (David Edmundson, Frameworks 6.7. Link). Also, friendly reminder that if you’re using Plasma’s systemd startup integration — which you probably are since it’s on by default for distros that ship systemd — the correct way to restart Plasma is systemctl restart --user plasma-plasmashell.service.

Other bug information of note:

Notable in Performance & Technical

In Discover, moved the processing of app ratings to another thread so it can’t block the UI thread and make the app feel slow and laggy when the network is slow (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Launching an app that lacks a .desktop file (e.g. an app packaged as an AppImage) no longer causes a brief screen freeze whose length is proportional to the size of the app’s executable (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Optimized how KDE software in general finds mountpoints, which can result in a significant speed-up for various apps’ file-based use cases — up to 80% for one of them! (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.7. Link)

How You Can Help

Please test the Plasma 6.2 beta release! We’ve focused a lot on stability for this release and want to make sure we haven’t missed anything big before the final release in about a month. Your bug reports do not go into a black hole; we triage every one! So enthusiastic testing and bug reporting is encouraged. 🙂 I’ve noticed fewer bug reports for this beta than previous ones, and I don’t believe for an instant that it’s because the release is already perfect! Go out there and file those bug reports!

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.