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 week we didn’t focus on features, and instead fixed bugs, improved performance, and improved the UI. There were several concerted pushes on various initiatives that bore a lot of fruit! Relatedly, if you notice that the number of high-priority bugs has risen, this is the result of recent bug triaging to prioritize those issues for fixing soon.

But don’t worry, there’s still a lot of feature work happening in the background, it’s just that none of it landed this week. Ultimately it’s good that we take our time here, as half-baked new features have been a source of bugs in the past. We want to make sure we’re merging work in a state that minimizes the chance of regressions.

So check it out:

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.5.0

The Ocean sound theme’s volume change feedback sound has been reduced in loudness so it doesn’t sound so harsh anymore, and doesn’t clip at high volumes. (Harald Sitter, link)

Plasma now shows a system notification by default when you plug in a device. This was done primarily for accessibility reasons, but can also help with troubleshooting. Note that we also did some work to make these notifications not annoying, so you’ll be less tempted to post negative comments on Phoronix before using it. And you can also turn the notifications off if you want, and go back to just sounds! Or no feedback at all, if you prefer that. (Nate Graham and Kai Uwe Broulik, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

The Adwaita GTK theme is now shown by its correct name on System Settings’ Application style page, rather than appearing as “Default”. (Luan Oliveira, link)

Made a bunch of accessibility improvements to System Settings’ Flatpak Permissions page. (Christoph Wolk, link)

On Plasma widgets’ “About” pages, website information is now shown in a more appropriate place, rather than with the license information. (Nate Graham, link)

Frameworks 6.18

All tasks that register with Plasma’s job tracker now automatically inhibit sleep and screen locking; this is now opt-out rather than opt-in. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

We’ve removed all of the colorful 3rd-party app icons from the Breeze icon theme. This was a complicated decision, but ultimately we reasoned that overriding 3rd-party app developers’ branding was rude, and we also realized that even if we didn’t care about that, we lacked the interest and resources to maintain the icons as those developers changed their apps’ branding over time. Anyone who feels sad about this is welcome to create an icon theme containing only the old colorful 3rd-party app icons which inherits Breeze, and stick it up on https://store.kde.org for others to use. (Nate Graham, link)

The “New Folder” Dialog invokable from Plasma and many KDE apps now word-wraps long paths, so the dialog can’t become comically wide. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

KDE Gear 25.12.0

Konsole and Kate are now capable of passing Wayland activation tokens back and forth, so running kate [path to file] in Konsole now causes existing Kate windows to get raised. For now it’s just those two apps; a more generic solution for arbitrary combinations of apps still needs to be implemented. (Christoph Cullmann, link 1 and link 2)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.4.5

Fixed an issue that could cause the ksgrd_network_helper process to stick around longer than needed, doing unnecessary work and potentially delaying system shutdown. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Fixed an issue that would, over time, generate multiple duplicate entries for Plasma widgets on System Settings’ Shortcuts page. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Prevented Spectacle’s menus from appearing in its screenshots on X11 as well. We originally fixed this for Plasma’s Wayland session, but have now backported the fix for the X11 session as well. (Ismael Asensio, link)

The plasma-apply-desktoptheme command-line tool works again. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Fixed the selection highlights in System Settings’ Region & Language page so that text has the right color when its list item is clicked or selected, no matter what color scheme you’re using. (Han Young, link)

Fixed an issue that could cause DDC/CI control of screen brightness to re-activate itself after a screen dims on idle, in the case where you deliberately turned it off and want it to stay off. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed an issue that caused NVIDIA GPUs to display the wrong names on Info Center’s “About This System” page. (Oleg Gorobets, link)

Fixed a weird issue in the Kicker Application Menu that prevented search results from appearing if you removed all the favorite apps. (Christoph Wolk, link)

The “Open in File Manager” button for camera devices that appear in the Disks & Devices popup now actually takes you to the location with all the pictures. (Bogdan Onofriichuk, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

Switching global themes now re-colors everything in your KDE apps immediately, without leaving any leftovers — at least for apps not packaged as Flatpaks. Those still need some work. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Maximizing a window with a blurred background no longer causes the blur to flicker a little bit. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Moving a window with a blurred background no longer results in the subtle noise texture of the blur moving in a direction that doesn’t match the window’s own movement. (Marcin Woźniak, link)

Fixed an issue that could cause the bouncy app launch feedback animation to sometimes not stop after the app’s window appeared. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Removing a System Tray widget no longer shows the wrong text in the notification that lets you undo removing it. (Filip Kendes, link)

Fixed an issue that prevented opening System Settings’ Virtual Desktops page from the pager widget on X11. (Efe Çiftci, link)

The GNOME Terminal app now gets the right background color when themed with the Breeze GTK theme. (Sebastian Parborg, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 4 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 28 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 23 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.4.5

Fixed an issue that could cause KWin to lag and stutter when you changed the brightness on a laptop using an Intel CPU from the Tiger Lake family or later. (Myrrh Periwinkle, link)

Frameworks 6.18

Made several performance and memory usage improvements to Kirigami-based apps and System Settings pages. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez and Nicolas Fella, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Made several speed and performance improvements to the thumbnailing system used throughout Plasma and KDE apps. (Akseli Lahtinen and David Edmundson, link 1 and link 2)

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!

You can also help us by making a donation! A monetary contribution of any size 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.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-33.

Didn’t Take Long To Reveal The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Exactly The Privacy-Crushing Failure Everyone Warned About

Tags: tech, politics, surveillance

Looked like a very bad idea in theory… now everyone can see how bad it is in practice. It’s disappointing that the UK government decided to go that path.

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/08/04/didnt-take-long-to-reveal-the-uks-online-safety-act-is-exactly-the-privacy-crushing-failure-everyone-warned-about/

Fight Chat Control - Protect Digital Privacy in the EU

Tags: tech, politics, surveillance, privacy

It’s looking bad, this still need to be fought.

https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

GitHub will be folded into Microsoft proper as CEO steps down

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, microsoft, github

Honestly, it took much longer than I expected. Now you know that GitHub has really become a conduit for Microsoft’s AI initiatives.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/github-will-be-folded-into-microsoft-proper-as-ceo-steps-down/

Miegakure: A 4D puzzle-platforming game.

Tags: tech, 3d, 4d, mathematics, game

OK, the concept if really mind bending. The tech behind it is really interesting.

https://miegakure.com/

Over engineering my homelab so I don’t pay cloud providers

Tags: tech, self-hosting, infrastructure

Definitely over engineered but a good way to play with many interesting tools.

https://ergaster.org/posts/2025/08/04-overegineering-homelab/

How I use Tailscale

Tags: tech, tools, networking, self-hosting

Interesting tips and caveats when using Tailscale.

https://chameth.com/how-i-use-tailscale/

HTTP is not simple

Tags: tech, http, complexity, protocols

The contrary is indeed claimed too often. This is far from a simple protocol, and that’s probably to be expected seeing its history and success.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/08/08/http-is-not-simple/

Cursed Knowledge

Tags: tech, reliability, communication, dependencies

Interesting approach for a project to collect such traps in their dependencies.

https://immich.app/cursed-knowledge/

Why do we even need SIMD instructions ?

Tags: tech, cpu, simd, performance

SIMD instructions are indeed a must to get decent performance on current hardware.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/08/09/why-do-we-even-need-simd-instructions/

This Send/Sync Secret Separates Professional From Amateur Rust Developers

Tags: tech, rust, multithreading

This is a nice summary of the Send and Sync traits semantic in Rust.

https://blog.cuongle.dev/p/this-sendsync-secret-separates-professional-and-amateur

Arenas in Rust

Tags: tech, memory, safety, security, rust

Interesting point, fairly logical but didn’t sit to think it through before. Indeed, using arenas to get back features of manual memory management won’t lead to the same security issues than outside of a memory safe language.

https://russellw.github.io/arenas

Are we Teaching Rust Effectively?

Tags: tech, rust, teaching, learning

Indeed, is it that the language itself has a steep learning curve? Or that the emphasis is on the wrong things in the public discourse? I like the emphasis on the Aliasing Xor Mutability, it looks like a good way to approach the language.

https://blog.kodewerx.org/2025/08/are-we-teaching-rust-effectively.html

A clever comment style

Tags: tech, programming, comments, c++

That’s an interesting trick to make sure people reevaluate comments when they remove some code. Doesn’t work for every language of course.

https://akrzemi1.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/a-clever-comment-style/

id Software Programming Principles

Tags: tech, programming, craftsmanship, agile, developer-experience

Those principles are old now, but they really captured the zeitgeist of the time.

https://felipe.rs/2017/02/25/id-software-programming-principles/

TDD Harms Architecture

Tags: tech, tests, tdd, architecture, design

A good debunk of that claim we sometime see. Of course the tests need to be designed and you need to have good architecture blueprints to follow, otherwise you’ll be in trouble… TDD or not.

https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2017/03/03/TDD-Harms-Architecture.html

Delete your Tests

Tags: tech, tests, quality

There’s a big “if” of course, don’t just throw your tests out of the window. But indeed, they need to bring value… so start by having really good tests.

https://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2014/04/27/delete-your-tests/

How Much Unit Test Coverage Do You Need? - The Testivus Answer

Tags: tech, tdd, tests, coverage

This is an old one but still a funny way to approach the question of test coverage. Unsurprisingly, the context matters.

https://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=106&thread=204677

Code Smells

Tags: tech, quality, smells, refactoring

A good explanation of why the concept is important, also comes with a nice list to get started.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-smells/

an engineer’s perspective on hiring

Tags: tech, hr, hiring, interviews

Hiring and designing interviews is still not an easy task in our field. This post gives a couple of interesting things to try.

https://jyn.dev/an-engineers-perspective-on-hiring

Bye for now!

This post is somewhat an update for my older post: Kate and Python language server

There seems to be a lot of different Python language servers.. And I just want one that does all and stays out of the way.

So after moaning about that I was pointed towards basedpyright on Fedi.

Despite the silly name, it works really well, so I set it up for Kate editor as I do. Here's how.

Install basedpyright

You may want to use something like pipx for this, that's at least what I did.

pipx install basedpyright

pylsp_in_env.sh

Then add pylsp_in_env.sh to PATH (such as ~/.local/bin/) Kate can see:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

path="$1"
cd $path
if [ -d ./.venv ]; then
  source ./.venv/bin/activate
elif [ -d ./venv ]; then
  source ./venv/bin/activate
elif [ -f ./Pipfile ]; then
  exec pipenv run basedpyright-langserver --stdio
  exit 0
fi

exec basedpyright-langserver --stdio

As mentioned in the previous post, this is needed to get the proper virtual environment. I also updated the script to work with Pipfiles.

Kate lsp settings

Then add this to Kate LSP settings.

I have also kept the pylsp settings there. It doesn't harm anything to have them there, in case you want to change the language server back to python-lsp-server.

{
	"python": {
		"command": [
			"pylsp_in_env",
			"%{Project:NativePath}"
		],
		"root": ".",
		"url": "https://docs.basedpyright.com/latest/",
		"highlightingModeRegex": "^Python$",
		"settings": {
			"basedpyright": {
				"analysis": {
					"typeCheckingMode": "off"
				}
			},
			"pylsp": {
				"plugins": {
					"pycodestyle": {
						"enabled": false
					},
					"ruff": {
						"enabled": true
					}
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

You can change the typeCheckingMode to different values like basic and recommended if project demands it. I set it off because with recommended there's A LOT of diagnostics that I usually don't need, unless again, the project expects proper type checking.

Done!

And that's it. Restart Kate or the Language server inside Kate and as long as Kate can find the file, it should just start up basedpyright-langserver and work.

I like this language server a lot, but if there's other challengers in future, expect me to make a post about them too.

Until next time!

Qt Group is pleased to announce the latest Long Term Supported release of Qt for MCUs. The 2.11 release is concentrated on stability with fewer new features . 

This blog lists some of the standout highlights from the 2.11 release and provides a roadmap of 2.x release for the rest of the year. 

KStars v3.7.8 is released on 2025.08.13 for Windows & Linux. MacOS release is pending. It's a bi-monthly bug-fix release with a couple of exciting features.

Live Stacking

The moment many of you have been waiting for has arrived! John Evans has introduced the highly anticipated Live Stacking feature to Ekos, seamlessly integrated into the FITS Viewer. Once you configure your live stacking directory, any FITS images added will be automatically stacked in real-time.

This feature works independently of your existing sequences or scheduler sessions, allowing you to configure the live stacker to process captured images for an enhanced view of your final results. It's particularly valuable for public observatories and star parties, where real-time feedback can greatly enhance the viewing experience.

Since Live Stacking is still in beta, we welcome your feedback and suggestions for improvement. Check out the demonstration videos below to see the feature in action and learn about its capabilities.

Equipment Profile Editor

The Ekos Equipment Profile editor has received a complete redesign. We've eliminated the limitations of the previous editor—you can now add unlimited drivers to your equipment profiles without restrictions. Need three different mounts in a single profile? No problem!

Both driver and profile lists now include search functionality, making it quick and easy to locate specific drivers. This flexibility gives you unprecedented control over your equipment configurations.

Focus History Navigation

Wolfgang Reissenberger has added an invaluable Focus History navigation feature. When autofocus encounters issues, you can now navigate through your focus frame history to inspect images from all autofocus runs, making troubleshooting much more effective.

The Focus module now includes a dedicated navigation panel. To optimize screen real estate, we've moved the detected stars display and current HFR readings above the V-Curve rather than below it, freeing up valuable space.

FITS Viewer Stretch Presets

Hy Murveit has refined the FITS Viewer stretch sliders and added a convenient preset button that cycles through seven different stretch configurations, offering various combinations of background brightness and contrast levels.

When you display the histogram and zoom in, the sliders provide much finer resolution control—particularly useful for precise black point adjustments.

Flatpak Support

Thanks to extensive collaboration between the Ikarus Technologies team, KDE Infrastructure team, and the Flathub community, we now offer both Stable and Nightly Flatpak packages.

The KStars Flatpak includes all INDI drivers and runs securely within the flatpak sandbox environment. This allows you to install both Stable and Nightly versions simultaneously without conflicts; perfect for testing the latest features and bug fixes while maintaining access to the stable release.

For installation on a brand new system, you'll need to install INDI firmware files. We've prepared comprehensive instructions and a simple installation script for both stable and nightly versions to facilitate this process.

Polar Alignment Improvements

Migration to Qt6

This release represents a significant technical milestone with our complete migration to Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6. KStars is still compatible with Qt 5 until all major distributions fully switch to Qt 6. While these changes happen behind the scenes, they provide a more robust foundation for future development.

The entire KStars development team contributed to this substantial effort. Special recognition goes to Eric Dejouhanet and Robert Lancaster, who invested countless hours reworking our complex CI/CD pipelines and macOS support builds in KDE's Craft system. This release wouldn't have been possible without their exceptional dedication.

Dark mode has been available in Plasma for quite a while now but the next release explores new areas where it can be taken one step further, beginning from some behind the scenes infrastructure to more user facing features such as dynamic wallpapers and automatic day/night global theme switching.

My journey to improving dark mode capabilities started at the recent Plasma Sprint. A while ago, I developed a wallpaper plugin that’s capable of synchronizing images to the position of the Sun, which I wanted to upstream but one of the biggest issues was the sheer size of the project. It supports a bunch of modes, it requires special tooling, and the wallpaper format is too cumbersome for upstream (although it’s amazing for 5K or 8K images!). So, I decided to make a pitch for adding one of the modes available in that plugin to other Plasma developers, which should be very easy to integrate with the existing infrastructure in Plasma. The idea was well-received and it led to a discussion about other related things, like better integration of geolocation services in Plasma, etc.

Day/night wallpapers

Some wallpaper packages can contain light and dark images. Currently, the light image will be used with a light color scheme, and the dark image will be used with a dark color scheme. The main idea behind the new day/night dynamic wallpapers was to exploit this design of the wallpaper packages: switch between light and dark images depending on the elevation of the Sun rather than the color scheme.

The plasma5-wallpapers-dynamic served as the basis for the new dynamic wallpaper mode in Plasma. It works exactly like we want. If geolocation data is available, use it to compute the position of the Sun. The daylight duration varies depending on your location throughout the year; by taking the geolocation into account, the dynamic wallpapers can closely match the dark/light cycle. If the geolocation is unknown, fall back to some pre-configured morning and evening times.

From functional point of view, it doesn’t have any purpose, but it’s a lovely touch that helps you to personalize your computer.

While on this, we also looked into optimizing the wallpaper configuration dialog. Specifically, fixing GridView in QtQuick so it is possible to reuse wallpaper preview items for smoother scrolling and re-working the wallpaper preview generation process for better performance and to make it less error prone.

How to create a day/night wallpaper

A day/night wallpaper is a regular wallpaper package but with light and dark images, Plasma does the rest to figure out what images should be displayed.

For example, imagine that you want to create a wallpaper with a lake. Then the wallpaper would look something like this

Lake/
├── contents
│   ├── images
│   │   ├── 1080x1920.png
│   │   └── 5120x2880.png
│   └── images_dark
│       ├── 1080x1920.png
│       └── 5120x2880.png
└── metadata.json

The Lake folder contains two things: a contents folder with images and a metadata.json file. The metadata.json file provides extra information about the wallpaper, e.g. the author, etc.

{
   "KPlugin": {
       "Authors": [
           {
               "Email": "foobar@example.com",
               "Name": "Name of the author"
           }
       ],
       "Id": "Next",
       "License": "CC-BY-SA-4.0",
       "Name": "Lake"
   },
   "X-KDE-CrossFade": true
}

The Id specifies the unique id of the wallpaper, the Name specifies the human readable name of the wallpaper. The metadata may also contain an X-KDE-CrossFade key, this is used to enable or disable long cross-fade. For example, if the transition from day to night lasts 30 minutes, then Plasma will slowly cross-fade from the light to the dark image for 30 minutes. Such a long cross-fade transition can be undesired if the images are too distinct.

images and images_dark folders contain light and dark images, respectively. Note that image file names must match the image resolution, i.e. 5120x2880.png instead of light.png, etc.

The wallpaper should be installed in /usr/share/wallpapers or ~/.local/share/wallpapers.

knighttime(d)

In addition to day/night wallpapers, it would also be nice if more things could be more dynamic. For example, switching the global theme at night. However, this creates a bit of a problem. If you want to configure the times when wallpapers or themes need to be changed, you will need to set settings for every feature individually, which is not great.

To solve that problem, a new desktop component was introduced that orchestrates when morning and evening transitions occurs – KNightTime. It’s a super duper tiny project with a client library and a daemon (knighttimed) that provides the schedule for day/night cycle transitions.

Since all features that synchronize to the day/night cycle subscribe to KNightTime, you only need to configure it to use specific morning and evening times. Night Light, day/night wallpapers and so on will be all synchronized.

knighttimed runs in background and it is started on demand, so in most cases, you don’t even need to worry about its existence.

Day/night themes

Besides the wallpaper, one can also switch between light and dark global themes depending on time of day.

Perhaps the hardest part about this was figuring out how to retrofit our system settings to accommodate for this new mode rather than actually implementing the logic that changes the active theme. Many thanks to Felix Ernst and Nate Graham for providing mock-ups and feedback about the UI.

It is worth noting that Plasma will switch between the themes only if the computer has been idle for 5 seconds. The main reason behind this is to avoid interruptions while actively using the computer. In case you don’t like it, you can turn it off in system settings or increase the default idle interval if you think it’s too low for your needs.

With the automatic mode, the global theme switching code is going to be stress-tested quite a bit, so we’ve also started (and continue) looking into various paper cut issues regarding theme switching, e.g. some buttons not adapting to the new color scheme correctly, etc.

Future improvements

There are other things that can be synchronized to the day-night cycle, for example screen brightness. Although, there is nothing clear on the radar yet.

Conclusion

The next release is going to feature a few dark mode improvements. Some are pretty technical, some are very user facing. In either case, I hope that things like this will help to make Plasma users happier and make Plasma stand out more among other desktop environments.

Intro

Last week, I added canvas limitations to keep the Selection Action Bar within a user's view. This week, I focused on positioning the toolbar so it renders directly underneath the initial selection instead of a hard coded value on the canvas. This change improves the user experience by reducing mouse travel and making the toolbar feel more intentional and intuitive to use.

Side note: This week I also added 2 buttons: 'Fill with Color' and 'Crop to Selection'.

Obstacles to Implementation

The first step to render the Selection Action Bar under the selection was to find the selection's coordinates.

Mapping Coordinates

The difficulty and learning opportunity I found during this process was understanding the difference between the image space and the canvas space. To keep it simple, selections live in the image space and the Selection Action Bar lives in the canvas space. Due to zooming in and out, different resolutions, and resizing, coordinates in the image space are not always equal to the canvas space. So to translate/map the coordinates of the selection to match where the toolbar should render, we can use KisCoordinatesConverter to translate these coordinates from image space to canvas space.

// get current selection
KisSelectionSP selection = d->m_viewManager->selection();

// get coordinates of current selection
QRectF selectionBounds = selection->selectedRect();
int selectionBottom = selectionBounds.bottom();
QPointF selectionCenter = selectionBounds.center();
QPointF bottomCenter(selectionCenter.x(), selectionBottom);

// translate the selection coordinates to the canvas widget space
QPointF widgetBottomCenter = converter->imageToWidget(bottomCenter);

// adjust/center/space how the toolbar renders under the selection
widgetBottomCenter.setX(widgetBottomCenter.x() - (d->actionBarWidth / 2)); 
widgetBottomCenter.setY(widgetBottomCenter.y() + d->bufferSpace);

// update the relative position of the toolbar
d->dragRectPosition = widgetBottomCenter.toPoint();

Conclusion

With these improvements, the UI now feels user friendly and intentional. For the next (and final) 2 weeks of GSoC, I plan to organize my documentation to build out a technical page on Krita's official documentation website and to refactor some code for better maintainability.

Contact

To anyone reading this, please feel free to reach out to me. I'm always open to suggestions and thoughts on how to improve as a developer and as a person. Email: ross.erosales@gmail.com Matrix: @rossr:matrix.org

The Amarok Development Squad is happy to announce the immediate availability of Amarok 3.3.1, the first bugfix release for Amarok 3.3 "Far Above the Clouds"!

3.3.1 features a number of minor bugfixes and code and build system cleanups. Some occasional crashes related to the new audio backend have also been fixed, and the remaining non-theme icons in user interface have been replaced. The new release also features improvements to the scripting support. Although current scripting functionality is not yet on a par with that of 2.x series in the '10's, especially the script console improvements should help anyone willing to explore the current capabilities.

Changes since 3.3.0

FEATURES:

• Enable saving and loading script console items, autocompletion in script console, and re-enable some more scripting functionality

CHANGES:

• Convert the remaining main UI toolbuttons to use icons from theme
• Clear out remnants of the now-discontinued MusicDNS service

BUGFIXES:

• Fix example permission grant command in database settings (BR 386004)
• Fix equalizer gains not updating when selecting some presets (BR 463908)
• Fix continuing playback after timecoded tracks (cue files etc, (BR 270003)
• Fix MusicBrainz search
• Properly start CD playback if Amarok is not already running (BR 503310)
• Also transmit embedded cover art through MPRIS (BR 357620)
• Don't show transcoding dialog after canceling download (BR 275840)
• Load network information earlier to avoid crashes on startup (BR 507497)
• Try to export as-compatible-as-possible playlist files (BR 507329)
• Fix some random crashes during playback

Getting Amarok

In addition to source code, Amarok is available for installation from many distributions' package repositories, which are likely to get updated to 3.3.1 soon, as well as the flatpak available on flathub.

Packager section

You can find the tarball package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Tuomas Nurmi's GPG key. One should also observe that Amarok 3.3.1 drops the previous optional build-time dependency to ffmpeg.

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 week some cool features and UI improvements landed. We’re in the middle of the Plasma 6.5 development cycle, so now’s the time to get your features merged, folks!

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.5.0

Pages in System Settings have gained the ability to communicate with the parent app a little bit. Now they can mark themselves as “not relevant”, for example when you don’t have the necessary hardware to use them. They can also export actions that will appear in the sidebar, allowing quick toggles for things like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. This has already been implemented for Bluetooth, and expect pages to start adopting these features soon where it makes sense! (Kai Uwe Broulik, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Discover has gained support for flatpak+https:// URLs, which allows the Install buttons on Flathub to automatically open Discover. (Timothée Ravier)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.5.0

Muting microphones with a dedicated "Mute Microphone" button/shortcut or else using the very cool secret Meta+Mute Microphone shortcut now mutes all microphones, rather than just the active one. This matches the behavior of muting speakers and other sound output devices. (Arnav Rawat, link)

Made a whole bunch of improvements to the cross-app window raising system throughout Plasma. You can read more about it in Kai Uwe’s blog post on the topic. (Kai Uwe Broulik and Xaver Hugl, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7)

The Plasma Browser Integration plugin for Firefox now blocks the system from going to sleep while a file is downloading, since Firefox doesn’t provide this feature itself. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Detected wireless networks are now shown on the relevant System Settings page, not just the System Tray applet anymore. You can connect to them there, too. (Arnav Rawat, link)

Almost all KRunner plugins now start to provide results after the first character typed. (Nate Graham, link)

Shortcuts for moving a window directly to another virtual desktop are now shown in the window titlebar context menu for that window. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

It’s now easier to see which screens are replicas of which other ones, because their serial numbers and connector names are now shown visibly. (Evgeniy Harchenko, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.4.4

System Settings’ Tablet page is now scrollable so you can see everything if you have a fancy pen with a lot of features. (Joshua Goins, link)

Fixed a visual glitch affecting Kicker Application Menu widget’ search field. (Christopher Wolk, link)

Plasma 6.4.5

Fixed the top crash in Plasma right now that could sometimes cause it to crash when you opened the Notifications history with any notifications in it. We thought we had fixed this before, but it came back, and now we have a better fix. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Fixed a really bad bug that would cause the .desktop file for a Flatpak app installed in your home folder to get moved when you dragged it from the Kickoff Application Launcher or Task Manager to somewhere else. (Marco Martin, link)

Fixed another bug related to dragging Flatpak apps to the desktop; now selecting “Copy” no longer produces a broken copy of the app’s .desktop file. (Marco Martin, link)

Fixed some more bugs that could cause desktop icons to shift around especially with multiple screens, and also for newly created files close to a vertical panel to be mis-positioned. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Task Manager theme previews now use the correct color scheme. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Frameworks 6.18

Fixed a bug that caused System Monitor Sensor widgets to be sized incorrectly on fit-content panels and make them resize themselves. (Leia Uwu, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 4 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 23 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.5.0

Made Discover’s firmware updating (“Fwupd”) backend much faster, after it was discovered to be a bottleneck in launching Discover. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)

Frameworks 6.18

You can now use the dumb Copilot key on the keyboards of many modern laptops as the trigger for launching apps or any other action in places where you can set up keyboard shortcuts. We don’t yet have a way for you to re-bind it to emulate another key (like the Ctrl key you probably wanted all along), but hopefully that will eventually happen as well. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Improved the speed of thumbnail generation throughout KDE apps and Plasma. (Akseli Lahtinen, link 1 and link 2)

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!

You can also help us by making a donation! A monetary contribution of any size 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.