The KDE team has released its This Week in Plasma update, showing the final polish being applied to Plasma 6.4 ahead of its June 17 release. Last week, the KDE team brought performance upgrades, and this week the team is continuing that with improvements like faster loading for System Monitor components in Plasma 6.4.
Future work for Plasma 6.5 is already underway, and it includes a feature that many have probably been waiting for: proper Picture-in-Picture support on Wayland. This uses an experimental version of the Wayland PiP protocol, which means applications like Firefox that also implement it can finally display PiP windows correctly. It is a long-overdue addition that moves the Wayland session closer to feature parity with X11.
The devs also merged KWin's Background Contrast effect into the Blur effect. Virtual desktops can now be re-ordered from the Pager widget, a feature previously missing. Invert and Zoom settings have been moved into the Accessibility page, which is a more sensible place for them than the Desktop Effects page was.
The team also brought consistency to the Breeze application style, with animated effects for checkboxes and radio buttons now working in QtQuick-based apps. Other small cleanups include standardizing the section headers in the Disks & Devices, Networks, and Bluetooth widgets. For those who do a lot of screen recording, Spectacle now makes it much clearer how to stop a recording, both in its notifications and shortcut names.
As for the immediate future, Plasma 6.4 and its first point release are getting accessibility and user interface tweaks. The team improved text contrast for labels used in secondary roles throughout Plasma, making things like brightness indicators much easier to read.
The Kicker Application Menu in 6.4 can now scroll horizontally when a search returns a ton of results, so you can actually see all of them.
The team also delivered some stability improvements in Plasma 6.4.0, most notably fixing a long-standing issue where adding widgets to oversized panels could freeze the entire shell. Discover also got a much-needed fix for a crash that occurred when suggesting replacements for unsupported Flatpak apps.
On the usability side, dragging files into a Folder View widget no longer causes glitchy visuals, and Open and Save dialogs from Flatpak-based browsers now properly allow the preview pane to open. Printing from Flatpak GTK apps now respects correct sizing, and installing or removing apps no longer wipes out your search input in Kicker or Kickoff while you're using it. Other notable fixes include:
- Selection rectangles on the desktop now render properly when using custom fonts or sizes (Plasma 6.3.6)
- A crash in System Monitor charts used by apps and Plasma components has been resolved (Frameworks 6.15)
- Switching process views in System Monitor no longer causes crashes (Frameworks 6.16)
- Open and Save dialogs no longer close when hovering over specific files (Frameworks 6.16)
- A thumbnailer crash on X11 caused by certain widget styles has been fixed (KDE Gear 25.04.3)
- Frameworks 6.15 also speeds up System Monitor by delaying tree view arrow loading
There are still 3 high-priority Plasma bugs holding out, and the list of quick-win "15-minute bugs" has grown to 23.
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