This week in Plasma: hardware is hard

Saturday, 19 October 2024 | Nate Graham

At this point we’ve addressed most of the nasty regressions people found in Plasma 6.2. Thankfully most were not widespread, and were instead related to people’s diverse hardware setups. Most seem to have had smooth upgrades, but those whose hardware setups misbehaved with changes made in 6.2 were a focus for rapid response. These kinds of hardware-specific issues are really difficult to test for ahead of time, which is why we’re always asking for more beta testers! For folks whose hardware encountered problems, I expect things to be pretty good with Plasma 6.2.2, which’ll be released in a few days.

In the meantime, the floodgates have been opened for those not working on bug fixes to start landing their feature work for Plasma 6.3! Check it all out below:

Notable New Features

It’s now possible to customize the pressure curve for drawing tablet pens! (Joshua Goins, Plasma 6.3.0. Link):

Added a new page to Info Center that shows technical data extracted from your screens’ EDID blocks (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

In Plasma’s Weather Report widget, added support for nighttime forecasts when using a weather station from the Deutscher Wetterdienst source (Wolfgang Müller, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Notable UI Improvements

If you manage to mess up your tablet calibration badly enough that it becomes impossible to use it to re-calibrate, System Settings’ drawing Tablet page will now reset the calibration when you click the “Default” button (Joshua Goins, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Plasma’s digital Clock widget now displays all events on days with more than five events, making it actually useful for that use case (Tino Lorenz, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Improved the way pop-ups using the “Sliding Popups” effect slide out of floating Plasma panels (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.3.0. Link):

Plasma’s Power and Battery widget now shows better placeholder text when you’re managing power using tlp instead of power-profiles-daemon, or when power-profiles-daemon is installed but not supported by the device’s firmware (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

It’s no longer possible to accidentally resize a Plasma widget’s pop-up from one of its edges that touches the edge of a screen or Plasma panel (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

The upload and download arrows in Plasma’s Networks widget now uses a different character that’s substantially more readable with many fonts (Tem PQD, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed a regression that could sometimes cause graphical corruption on external screens attached to certain NVIDIA GPUs (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.1. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a regression that caused Kickoff to unexpectedly open after you hold down the Shift key and press Alt, which may seem like it’s an unusual thing to do, but it can be common in certain video games and it’s quite disruptive in that context (Yifan Zhu, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed a case where System Settings’ Wallpaper page could crash when previously configured in a way that’s now invalid (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed a case where the tablet calibration overlay could appear on a monitor where it doesn’t make any sense (Joshua Goins, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

Fixed three regressions accidentally introduced in Plasma 6.2.1 while fixing other bugs: one causing crashes on multi-GPU systems, the second making the splash screen take too long, and the final one making the cursor not change shape properly when hovering over links in certain apps (Xaver Hugl and David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.1.1. Link 1, link 2, and link 2)

Fixed a performance regression affecting people using NVIDIA GPUs and the Night Light feature (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.1.1. Link)

Fixed a regression that caused HDR to stop working properly in games that request absurd brightness levels, like a billion nits of brightness (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.2. Link)

Fixed a regression that could cause the cursor to misbehave in certain video games (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.2. Link)

Fixed an issue that caused visual distortion in the clipboard widget’s config window when interacting with it in a very specific way (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.2. Link)

Fixed two visual issues in Breeze’s GTK 4 theming (Łukasz Patron, Plasma 6.3.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a minor issue with widgets on the Plasma desktop that would cause the cursor to inappropriately use the hand shape after dragging them and then later hovering over an edge (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.3.0. Link)

Some third-party apps handle files in a buggy way, and overwrite your file associations such that certain file types get configured to always open with the kde-open or xdg-open command-line tools. When they do this, the system no longer consumes all CPU and memory resources and crashes; instead opening the file simply doesn’t work (Akseli Lahtinen, Frameworks 6.8. Link)

Opening a “Get New [stuff]” dialog on any System Settings pages no longer sometimes causes the app to secretly stay open after you close it, which would prevent it from being re-opened again and make you want to throw the computer out the window (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 6.8. Link)

Category icons in Kickoff are now symbolic as intended when using the Breeze Dark icon theme. Also put in place some other changes to prevent this happening again in the future (David Redondo, Frameworks 6.8. Link 1 and link 2)

Other bug information of note:

Performance & Technical

Refined the tablet calibration feature so that it produces more accurate calibrations (Joshua Goins, Plasma 6.2.1. Link)

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.