This Week in Plasma: many many things

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 was a busy week, with tons of new features, improvements, and bug fixes! Hopefully everyone will find something to like here:

Notable new Features

Plasma 6.4.0

System Monitor's Applications page now groups background services into a new "Background Services" item so you can see at a glance how the non-application parts of the system are using resources as well without having to switch pages. (Arjen Hiemstra, link 1 and link 2)

The Bluetooth widget now lets you configure it to display a badge with the number of connected devices. (Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Frameworks 6.14

KRunner is now aware of some archaic units like furlongs and rods, so you can convert them to more modern units. (Nate Graham, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.3.5

When adding a new printer, you now immediately have the option to set it as the default printer even if it's the only one added so far. This supports the use case where you're about to add another printer but want the first one to be the default. (Mike Noe, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

System Settings' Drawing Tablet page now shows a visualization of your stylus and its buttons so that it's easier for you to see how to configure it. (Joshua Goins, link)

System Settings' Drawing Tablet page now makes it easier to recover from mis-calibrating your tablet: now there's an auto-revert timer you need to explicitly dismiss, and a more prominent "reset" button if needed. (Joshua Goins, link)

System Settings' Recent Files page now uses standard grid item styling. (Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)

Info Center now displays page load errors in a more humane way. (Nate Graham, link)

When you use the Task Manager's setting to make apps demanding attention not force an auto-hide panel to be visible, the config dialog will now show a message asking you to see if the app itself has an option to disable this behavior. Telegram Desktop does! (Nate Graham, link)

The portal-based open/save dialogs are now modal with their parent windows, just like non-portal versions already are. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Discover, Info Center, and DrKonqi now respect your configured monospace font for their views that use monospaced text, rather than just using a fixed monospace font. (Noah Davis, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, and link 5)

Any password already typed into the login screen's password field is now cleared when switching users. (Nate Graham, link)

Opening a Plasma Vault now opens it in a new tab in Dolphin if it's not an activity-specific Vault in a multi-activity environment. In that case, a Dolphin window in another activity could get activated, which would close it immediately. (Nate Graham, link)

Frameworks 6.14

The common Kirigami.FormLayout component that's used throughout System Settings and many apps now has a more visually pleasing style when there's not enough horizontal space to display everything in its normal mode: now when it switches to narrow mode, the content column is centered and its width capped. This looks much better when the view is very wide, which is common especially in System Settings with using the system in a language other than English or Chinese. (Nate Graham, link)

Scrollable views throughout QML-based KDE software now play nice animations for horizontal mouse wheel scrolling too, not just vertical mouse wheel scrolling. (Noah Davis, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.3.5

Fixed a KWin crash caused by GPU resets. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a regression accidentally introduced in Plasma 6.3.4 whereby the Activity Switcher sidebar would be mis-positioned on multi-screen setups. (Niccolò Venerandi, link 1 and link 2)

The Meta+P shortcut to open the screen chooser overlay now works when you're using Qt 6.8.3 or 6.9.0, which changed a few DBus things and broke it. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

The grid items on System Settings' Recent Files page no longer inappropriately highlight when the whole grid view is disabled. (Nate Graham, link)

When using reversed mode on a Task Manager widget on a vertical panel, the group dialog popups are no longer inappropriately rotated 180°. (Nate Graham, Link)

In Discover, Header text for offline upgrades is now displayed correctly at very narrow window widths. (Nate Graham, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

Dragging items on the Kickoff Application Launcher's Favorites grid to re-arrange them no longer sometimes launches them afterwards. (Noah Davis, link)

On Wayland, screen mirroring is now aware of differences in mirrored screens' aspect ratios, and letterboxes the screen content as needed. (Xaver Hugl, link)

The clipboard popup that appears when you press Meta+V no longer sometimes appears on the wrong screen on X11. (Fushan Wen, link)

The Plasma Desktop no longer shows the wrong context menu if you right-click very very rapidly after a left-click, or while holding down the left mouse button. (Nate Graham, link)

Fixed a case where a warning message on System Settings' Drawing Tablet page could overflow off the page. (Joshua Goins, link)

The Digital Clock widget's config dialog no longer inappropriately asks you to confirm or discard changed setting when you navigate away after enabling and and then disabling a calendar plugin, or vice versa. (Christoph Wolk, link)

On Wayland, the Task Switcher preview visualizations no longer open in the wrong location on the screen. (Ismael Asensio, link)

If you've enable notification popups for KWin alerts about apps hanging, their text is now displayed correctly. (Roke Julian Lockhart Beedell, link)

Frameworks 6.14

Fixed a regression I accidentally introduced in Frameworks 6.13 that made the Telegram Desktop app show a symbolic icon rather than a colorful one on the Task Manager for panels that are 38 pixels thick or less. (Leandro Guedes and Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)

Titles of System Settings pages are once again pixel-perfect identical no matter if the pages are implemented using QtQuick or QtWidgets. (Ismael Asensio, link)

Fixed an issue affecting every scrollable view in QML-based KDE software that made it fail to play scroll animations when using certain non-default mouse wheel scroll speeds. (Noah Davis, link)

Fixed an issue in the built-in KRDP remote desktop server that caused scrolling to trigger the default top-left hotcorner effect when connecting using the "xfreerdp" app. (Jack Xu, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 1 very high priority Plasma bug (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 21 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 20 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.4.0

Implemented support for the "Single-pixel buffer" Wayland protocol, which improves efficiency for apps that use it. (Xaver Hugl, link)

The code that checks for screen rotation is now disabled while the screen is off, saving some energy especially for mobile devices. (Bhushan Shah, link)

Frameworks 6.14

KWallet is now just a wrapper around the cross-desktop "Secret Service" system, plus a thin compatibility layer for apps that haven't migrated to use Secret Service directly. Read more about this here! (Marco Martin, link)

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:

• Triage and confirm bug reports, maybe even identify their root cause
• Contribute designs for wallpapers, icons, and app interfaces
• Design and maintain websites
• Translate user interface text items into your own language
• Promote KDE in your local community
• …And a ton more things!

You can also help us by making a donation! Any monetary contribution — however small — 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.