This Week in Plasma: ambient light sensor support
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week many KDE contributors wound down their activities in preparation for some well-deserved rest. But that didn’t stop the merging of some impactful work anyway!
This will be 2025’s last This Week in Plasma post; I too will take a break next week. Happy holidays for those who celebrate, and I’ll see you all in 2026!
Notable New Features
Plasma 6.6.0
Implemented support for automatic brightness adjustment on devices with ambient light sensors! (Xaver Hugl, KDE bug #502122)
Notable UI Improvements
Plasma 6.5.5
Improved KRunner’s search matching algorithms to prioritize partial matches at the beginning of apps’ names, descriptions, and keywords. This should fix issues like searching for “ala” and getting “KAlarm” as the top match instead of “Alacritty”. (Harald Sitter, KDE bug #512400 and KDE bug #512399)
Plasma 6.6.0
Added a workaround for Windows games with HDR support to make sure their colors still look good when run in WINE or Proton. (Xaver Hugl, KDE bug #509114)
Spectacle’s notifications about screenshots now include an “Open Containing Folder” button, and persist in the history if you don’t manually close them. This should make it harder to miss where your screenshots got saved to. (Noah Davis, Spectacle MR #499)
Fixed an issue in Spectacle that made the bottom toolbar in Rectangular Region mode get cut off when the selected region is close to the bottom of a screen with certain screen setups. (Mario Roß, Spectacle MR # 498)
System Settings’ Wi-Fi & Networking page now shows information about the connected Wi-Fi networks, just like the System Tray popup does. (Alexander Wilms, KDE bug #471071)
Discover now shows available updates within the app in a fancier-looking way. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE bug #509926)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.5.5
Disabling visual customization of Plasma via the Kiosk system now hides relevant buttons on System Settings’ Quick Settings page. (Nicolas Fella, KDE bug #511381)
6.6.0
Made opacity window rules work for picture-in-picture windows. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE bug #513374)
Frameworks 6.22
Fixed a large number of clipboard-related issues on Wayland. (David Edmundson and David Redondo, kguiaddons MR #191)
The next release of WallpaperEngineKDE
Fixed one of the most common crashes in Plasma, caused by using the 3rd-party WallpaperEngineKDE wallpaper plugin. (catsout, wallpaper-scene-renderer Issue #13)
Other bug information of note:
- 5 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 59 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 55 last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.5.5
Fixed an issue that prevented KWin from using direct scanout when the Battle.net launcher is open. (Xaver Hugl, KDE bug #513203)
Plasma 6.6.0
Reduced frame drop on monitors with extremely high refresh rates. (Xaver Hugl, KDE bug #513296)
Implemented the ability for portal-based applications to actively inhibit logout, for example because they have unsaved documents open. (David Edmundson, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #391)
How You Can Help
Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. In total, KDE has raised over €300,000 during this fundraiser! The average donation is about €25. KDE truly is funded by you!
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.