This Week in Plasma: Bi-Directional RDP Clipboard Sync

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week was full of user interface improvements and performance enhancements, and we snuck in a few features as well:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

Remote desktop sessions now offer a fully shared clipboard, rather than only sending the server’s clipboard to the client. (Nick Haghiri, krdp MR #213)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8

Events shown in the Digital Clock widget now display their descriptions inline, rather than in a hover tooltip. (Francesco Fortunelli, KDE Bugzilla #429700)

The scrolling speed sliders on System Settings’ Mouse and Touchpad pages are now accompanied by spinboxes that permit fine-tuning their speeds. (Wladimir Leuschner, KDE Bugzilla #477745)

Discover now shows all of the external links that apps can set in their metadata. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #522213)

Interactive UI elements on the logout screen are now only shown on the active monitor, mirroring the same thing on the lock and login screens. And the whole thing now fades in and out faster, too. (Ramil Nurmanov, and Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #431382 and kwin MR #9711)

The wallpaper chooser UI that’s visible in System Settings and the desktop configuration window now loads in a smoother and less glitchy-looking way. (Artem Grinev, plasma-workspace MR #6892)

The Power & Battery widget’s “Manually Block Sleep and Screen Locking” switch is now vertically aligned to its icon. See, KDE really does care about margins and alignment! 😁 (Angel Parra, powerdevil MR #662)

New

Old

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

The Power & Battery widget’s tooltip no longer talks about scrolling to change the power mode on systems without either of the power-profiles-daemon or tuned-ppd systems installed and working. (Nate Graham, powerdevil MR #663)

Plasma 6.7.5

Fixed a somewhat common way that Discover could crash on systems using the RPM-OSTree architecture, such as Fedora Kinoite. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, discover MR #1385)

If the fwupd system service is broken or masked using systemd, the rest of Discover still works as expected. (Tobias Fella, discover MR #1373)

When the Task Manager widget is used with a right-to-left language or its tasks are configured to appear “to the left”, the tasks now move to the expected location when manually rearranged by dragging. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #504898)

Custom accent colors defined within wallpapers are once again honored. (Zhora Zmeykin, KDE Bugzilla #514656)

Plasma 6.8

Fixed a case where the remote desktop server could crash when closing a connection. (Wengsheng Tang, krdp MR #189)

Resizing an aspect-ratio-locked window no longer sometimes makes it disappear! (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #479547)

The OSD displayed when muting or unmuting microphones using the Microphone Indicator widget now shows the correct icon. (Undef Fox, KDE Bugzilla #472107)

Apps packaged as Flatpaks or using Nix now get pinned to the Task Manager widget in a more robust way, so they’re less likely to get broken in the future if the underlying locations of their .desktop files change. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #505066)

The Emoji Selector window now uses the same consistent order for the gendered variants of all emojis, not just some of them. (Tobias Ozór, plasma-desktop MR #3939)

New

Old

The pointer now looks even sharper at absurdly enormous sizes when you shake it for ages and ages. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #9176)

Right-clicking twice on the same pixel of the desktop without moving the pointer no longer shows the wrong context menu the second time. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #504765)

Frameworks 6.30

Fixed a bug that could make KDE Connect consume 100% of a whole CPU core. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #517743)

Very large images on the clipboard no longer sometimes fail to paste successfully. (Zhora Zmeykin, KDE Bugzilla #519651)

Various dialogs throughout KDE software once again properly offer the opportunity to open executable text and script files in a text editor app, working around an upstream change in shared-mime-data which had broken this. (Méven Car, KDE Bugzilla #522948)

Kup 0.11.0

Kup’s notification about backup progress no longer erroneously tells you that the backup destination is on your phone that’s paired with KDE Connect. (Harald Sitter, KDE Bugzilla #518494)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.6.7

Added support for monitoring GPU usage for Intel A380 GPUs. (Takahiro Hashimoto, KDE Bugzilla #517334)

Pasting very large PNG images no longer sometimes causes some lagging and stuttering. (Zhora Zmeykin, plasma-workspace MR #6874)

Plasma 6.7.5

KWin now supports more than one wl_data_device, which opens the door to improved drag-and-drop support in Firefox. (Martin Stransky, KDE Bugzilla #521494)

Spectacle is now slightly faster at taking screenshots. (Zhora Zmeykin, kwin MR #9752)

Plasma 6.8

The new kscreenctl tool now supports setting custom CVT timings/modelines. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #517654)

Frameworks 6.30

Reduced the number of times the common Kirigami.Icon component needs to read from the disk while looking for fallback icons. (Jakob Petsovits, kirigami MR #2139)

The Baloo file indexer now correctly ignores Btrfs snapshots that happen to be stored in your home directory, instead of pointlessly trying to index them. (Hadi Chokr, baloo MR #295)

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.

Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team!

Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. 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.

You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keeps KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bug fix mentioned here

Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.