Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week we released the second beta of Plasma 6.5, and there are a lot of fixes in it! This week also sees some great bug fixes, as well as a number of UI improvements related to language and time.

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.5.0

When you’re using your system in a language that’s not English, you can now find Emojis in the Emoji Selector window by searching for their English names, in addition to the names in your primary language. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Image 2: English search for “Cherries” resutning the right Emoji when the system language is set to German Week numbers shown in Plasma’s various calendars have now been italicized to distinguish them from day numbers. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

Made multiple UI improvements to the time zone chooser map that’s visible in a few places: you can now zoom in and out farther, the map zooms in a more predictible way, there’s no more blurry text, and the borders of the clickable areas now perfectly map the borders drawn on the map. (Niccolò Venerandi, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Image 3: Nicer map zoomed in on Austria When using a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew, Plasma will now show reversed versions of the audio icons in various places when the icon theme contains them — and the Breeze icon theme now does. (Farid Abdelnour and Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, and link 5)

Image 4: Audio icons pointing in the right direction when the system language is set to Arabic Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.4.6

Discover’s automatic shutdown/restart feature now allows apps with unsaved changes to prompt you to save first, preventing potential data loss. (Nate Graham and Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)

Fixed an issue preventing the message about other users being logged in when you try to restart or shut down from appearing. (Nate Graham, link)

Fixed an issue preventing Flatpak apps from being able to create launchers using the Dynamic Launcher portal. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Fixed an issue that made the Applications table on System Monitor’s main page blurry with certain scale factors. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Removing the background of widgets in System Monitor now visually adjusts them to the color scheme properly. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Timestamps are now shown as expected for print jobs in the print queue. (Mike Noe, link)

The numbers in Plasma’s Timer widget now visually adjust to the color scheme properly. (Marco Martin, link)

When you’ve got Discover set up to prioritize apps from distro repos over Flatpak and/or Snap, searching for apps no longer inappropriately prioritizes the Flatpak or Snap versions. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Ampersands now appear correctly in text that shows up in the context menus of Task Manager tasks. (Marco Martin, link)

Fixed an issue that made the Media Player widget display filenames containing certain characters incorrectly. (Conor Smith, link)

Dragging a desktop widget partially off of a screen edge no longer makes the visualization of its position disappear. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

Fixed a case where DIscover could crash while quitting. (Aleix Pol Gonzales, link)

Fixed an issue in Discover that made it sometimes fail to display reviews properly for certain apps. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Fixed several issues with the Application Dashboard launcher: now it closes on focus loss like other launchers, doesn’t resize itself inappropriately if it’s open when the screen resolution, scale, or geometry changes, and no longer fails to pre-select items for many types of search results. (Niccolò Venerandi, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Fixed an issue with the desktop grid view of KWin’s Overview effect that made it not show windows on inactive virtual desktops when using an unrelated non-default option. (Marco Martin, link)

Fixed a few sources of visual glitches when dragging items on the desktop when using a fractional scale factor. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

If you’ve got a misbehaving screen that connects and disconnects multiple times when plugged in (screens suck), you’ll no longer see multiple system notifications about this. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Using a font with a very tall baseline (for example, with many Arabic fonts) no longer makes text overflow out of the grid items on the Add Widgets sidebar. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

The Reset button on System Settings’ Date & Time page now resets the current time zone too, if it’s been changed at all. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Removed Spectacle’s “Show capture instructions” option, because it didn’t do anything anymore after we removed the giant text field in the rectangular region UI in Plasma 6.4. (Nate Graham, link)

Frameworks 6.19

Fixed a case where Plasma would crash when asked to display certain malformed themes. (Marco Martin, link)

Fixed the “Delete oldest files from the trash” option for how to handle a full trash. (Pan Zhang, link)

Fixed an issue that made it impossible to paste text containing “file:///%E2%80%9D into a Sticky Note widget. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Other bug information of note:

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.4.6

Fixed an issue that made Plasma consume CPU time for no reason while the Networks widget is visible in the active part of the System Tray, until the first time the System Tray popup is opened. (Fabian Vogt, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

The time that Discover last notified you about updates is now stored in the state config file, not the settings config file. This is part of the meta-project to move rapidly-changing information out of config files so you can version-control them more easily. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

Old stale config data about ancient panels no longer clutters up your Plasma config file; it’s now deleted as intended. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Slightly improved the speed and memory efficiency of opening the Sticky Note widget’s context menu. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Frameworks 6.19

Fixed an issue that made System Monitor render graphs when not visible, wasting resources. (Arjen Hiemstra, 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, too.

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.