This week in Plasma: converging 6.2

The core Plasma team remains deep in bug-fixing mode until Plasma 6.2.1, with lots of bugs fixed this week! This is the second-to-last week of development before the repos are frozen, and we’re cranking away like mad to get 6.2 in great shape. And it is indeed in very good shape so far. The worst issues we’re still seeing are related to notifications freezing and being mis-rendered, caused by recent changes made to fix another significantly less severe issue. So in the worst-case scenario, we can simply revert the changes before the final 6.2 release if we don’t manage to fix the regressions in time.

Something I hope we can prove to the world is that we’re capable of keeping Plasma stable over the long haul at the same time that we add features and refine the UI. Plasma 6.2 offers us a good opportunity for it!

Notable UI Improvements

Kickoff’s category icons have been made symbolic and monochrome (where the active icon theme supports it), which conforms better to the HIG and other apps, and mirrors a similar change done for Discover recently (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

On System Settings’ Region and Language page, the list of languages you can add to your system is now alphabetized by first letter (rather than by the hidden language code), and all the languages are properly capitalized (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)

In Plasma’s Digital Clock popup, calendar dates are now perfectly horizontally aligned even when some of them have text for events under them, and content can no longer sometimes overflow the header when using the combination of an alternate calendar plugin, certain third-party Plasma themes, and a large font size (Tusooa Windy, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)

It’s now possible to get a standard context menu for the text field that appears when renaming files or folders on the desktop (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

System Settings’ Legacy X11 App Support page now supports the non-default settings highlighting feature (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

With the “Switch virtual desktops on screen edge” setting turned on, screen edges with no virtual desktop on the other side of them will no longer inappropriately show a glow anyway (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Plasma notifications that show job progress no longer include a “Details” button if there are no extra details to show (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Windows no longer snap to the invisible edge where an auto-hidden panel would be when it’s visible (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Improved the margins and paddings for the “Add Widgets” sidebar (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2):

When dragging an abstract representation of an app (from e.g. Kickoff, KRunner, or Task Manager) to the desktop, you’ll no longer be prompted to create an Icon widget out of it; you’ll now only have the “Copy” and “Link” options that create an actual file. The Icon Widget option was found to be confusing on the desktop because it doesn’t follow the normal semantics for desktop icons. This is part of a larger project to improve the usability of dragging apps to the desktop; expect more similar patches in coming weeks (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Improved how System Settings’ Default Applications page communicates the situation where you’ve forced it to use an app that doesn’t actually advertise support for the file formats you want it to open (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.3.0. Link):

Don’t do this, it’s silly!

Every KWin effect listed on System Settings’ Desktop effects page that needs to be activated using a keyboard shortcut now mentions this in its caption (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Plasma’s Sticky Note widget now has a symbolic monochrome widget when placed on a panel while using the Breeze icon theme. This completes the project to support symbolic panel icons for all of the widgets we ship by default! (Martin Frueh, Frameworks 6.7. Link 1 and link 2):

The “sleep and screen locking are inhibited” icon has gotten a redesign to hopefully make its meaning clearer (Andy Betts and Natalie Clarius, Frameworks 6.7. Link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed a case where KWin would crash while you’re using the Khronkite tiling script (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a case where KWin could crash under certain circumstances while the Sheet effect is active (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash and KWin could hang when you drag a layer from GIMP onto the desktop for some reason (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when you chicken out of applying a Global Theme and its associated desktop layout after starting the process (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a case where Powerdevil could crash on login (Alessandro Astone, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a way that System Settings’ KWin Rules and Device Automount pages could crash on close due to the use of nested event loops. Nested event loops are evil; get rid of them all! (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)

XWayland-using apps now have their accessibility properties exposed to screen readers as expected (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

When Flatpak has an oopsie and throws the dreaded “Aborted due to failure” message while you’re updating Flatpaks, Discover now wraps it in a nicer message telling you to try again later, which is usually enough to make it work the next time. This also fixes a related issue with Discover’s error dialogs that could cause them to not be large enough to show their content in some cases. Unfortunately we have not been able to actually fix the error itself or improve its wording yet, since it’s a bug in Flatpak itself (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed an annoying bug that could cause some (not all) tiled CSD-using apps to become un-tiled when their headers are clicked. This affected VSCode specifically, but for other affected apps (e.g. Firefox) it can also be an app-specific issue (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

On System Settings’ Shortcuts page, extremely long labels for shortcuts no longer sometimes overflow the layout (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a bug that could cause maximized windows in multi-screen setups to be restored to the wrong screen after un-maximizing them with certain methods (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Setting up the Meta key to toggle KWin’s Overview effect now works consistently after a reboot (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed an issue that prevented newly installed or deleted third-party splash screens from being shown or removed (respectively) from the relevant System Settings page at the right times (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed an issue that made it hard to trigger edges and hotcorners on screen edges that also have a Plasma panel in auto-hide mode (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a graphical glitch affecting people using AMD and NVIDIA GPUs who maximize windows on a screen with a floating panel (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a color bug in Kirigami that caused the text of disabled buttons in various Kirigami-based apps to not look visually disabled, and also caused caused some pieces of text to inappropriately have a disabled appearance on System Settings’ Screen Locking page (Marco Martin and Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 6.7. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a series of sizing bugs affecting Kirigami.Dialog and its subclasses that could cause it to not be wide enough when assigned very long footer buttons (Akseli Lahtinen, Frameworks 6.7. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed the ugly new Qt font selector dialog to at least not be completely visually broken when using a dark color scheme (Kai Uwe Broulik, Qt 6.8.0. Link)

Setting the GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 environment variable on your system to make GTK apps use the portal system (and hence use the superior KDE file dialog) no longer breaks font rendering in GTK apps quite horribly unless the GTK portal is also installed (Ilya Fedin, GTK 3.24.44, Link)

Other bug information of note:

Notable in Performance & Technical

Improved the speed with which the Plasma Task Manager widget’s context menu appears when recent document tracking is globally disabled, especially when using a networked home directory (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.27.12. Link)

Fixed the binding loops affecting Kirigami.Dialog and its subclasses. These components are widely used, so this should make a difference (Akseli Lahtinen, Frameworks 6.7. Link)

How You Can Help

Please continue to 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 two weeks. Your bug reports do not go into a black hole; we triage every one! So enthusiastic testing and bug reporting is encouraged. 🙂

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.