This Week in Plasma: Better hardware support
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week saw a bunch of user interface improvements and bug fixing, especially for the drawing tablets, printers, and monitors. Hardware is quirky!
But of course that’s not all; check out the rest, too:
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.6.0
You can now Alt+click/double-click on desktop items to see their properties, just like you can in Dolphin. (Méven Car, plasma-desktop MR #3349)
When a printer runs low on ink for multiple cartridges simultaneously, all the messages about this are now condensed into a single notification, instead of showing a separate notification for each low ink cartridge. (Mike Noe, print-manager MR #291)
System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page now makes it more obvious when the lack of configurable pad buttons is due to a missing driver. (Joshua Goins, plasma-desktop MR #3234)
Spectacle now offers a Cancel button in the rectangular region overlay, so you can get out of it without having to press the Esc key. (Taras Oleksyn, bug #490980)
Locking the screen from the Application Launcher widget now closes it before locking so it’s not somewhat awkwardly left open after you unlock. (Christoph Wolk, bug #508725)
On distros that make you authenticate to toggle the feature to set the date and time automatically, closing the authentication window without authenticating no longer makes the page complain about an error. (David Edmundson, bug #501966)
Apps launched from the Favorites view of the Kickoff, Kicker, and Dashboard widgets are now added to the “Recent Apps” section. (Christoph Wolk, bug # 449834 and bug #435356)
Did a pass over several pages in System Settings to make sure they follow the KDE Human Interface Guidelines more closely. (Nate Graham, plasma-desktop MR #3309)
You’re no longer allowed to try to change the usernames of logged-in users, since this doesn’t work anyway. (Nate Graham bug #469665)
You’re now warned about the potential consequences if you try to disable the System Tray’s built-in Notifications widget, since those consequences may not be obvious. (Nate Graham, plasma-workspace MR #6044)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.5.4
Fixed an issue that made the Orca screen reader’s “learn” mode speak too much and send extraneous keystrokes to apps. (Nicolas Fella, bug #512189)
Fixed an issue that could occasionally cause a crash when charging your system after the critical battery level notification appeared. (Anthony Fieroni, powerdevil MR #594)
Fixed an issue that made the screen turn black with certain older monitors directly connected via an analog VGA cable. (Xaver Hugl, bug #512146)
Fixed another source of the issue that made desktop icons move to the wrong screen of a multi-screen arrangement on login. (bug #512381)
Fixed an issue that made it impossible to configure certain buttons of the Wacom Pen Pro 3D stylus. (Joshua Goins, bug #511488)
System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page now does a better job of handling weird tablets that say they have two stylii when they really only have one. (Joshua Goins, bug #508084)
Fixed an issue that made Plasma inaccurately warn that your printer was low on ink when it sent an unexpected ink level code but wasn't actually low on ink. (Mike Noe, bug #512602)
Fixed an issue that made the Task Manager widget’s “Forget recent [thing]” menu items unreliable for certain apps. (Méven Car, bug #480276)
Fixed a visual glitch in the Track Mouse effect when using a high DPI scale factor. (Xaver Hugl, bug #510029)
Plasma 6.6.0
Fixed an issue that made the Task Manager widget’s “Forget” action for specific files only take effect after Plasma was restarted. (Christoph Wolk, bug #503840)
Frameworks 6.21
Fixed an issue that could crash the open/save dialogs when you double-clicked on a column header while in Details mode. (David Edmundson, frameworks-kio MR #2070)
Fixed an issue that could make popups invoked from folders on the desktop misbehave when created from symlinks. (Lluc Simó Margalef, bug #479350)
Frameworks 6.22
Fixed an issue in the Quick Launch widget that made icons start dragging after right-clicking them. (Jonathan Marten, bug #384009)
Other bug information of note:
- 5 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 37 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 36 last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.6.0
Implemented support for for per-DRM-plane color pipelines. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #6600)
Plasma now re-checks the battery level after waking from sleep, which handles the case of the battery draining (or charging) while asleep in such a manner that it would be appropriate to show or hide a notification about the battery level. (Ramil Nurmanov, powerdevil MR #592)
How You Can Help
Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. Believe it or not, the fundraiser has topped €100,000! And that’s just for the fundraiser itself; the yearly donation pop-up has also raised another €100k in just the past five days (!!!).
It’s kind of amazing. This money will help keep KDE strong and independent for years to come, and I’m just in awe of the generosity of the KDE community and userbase. Thank you all for helping KDE to grow and prosper!
If money is tight, you can help KDE by directly getting involved. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. 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.
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.