As the release of KDE 6.4.0 draws near, the KDE team has been focused on squashing bugs, something we highlighted in last week's "This Week in Plasma" issue. Even though Plasma 6.4 entered a feature freeze last week, the team still managed to squeeze in a new feature this week called Time of Day wallpapers.
Thanks to this new feature, Plasma will now automatically switch compatible wallpapers between their light and dark versions based on the day/night cycle. Visual polish also improves the previews of these dynamic wallpapers, making them look better and clearly marked as dynamic. Previously, users had to rely on third-party projects, clunky slideshow setups, or shell scripts via cron jobs to achieve this functionality.
Moving on to small improvements, the team has removed wallpapers and other add-ons from its search page. However, it is not gone entirely, as you can still find them as long as you initiate a search while on the "Add-Ons" page.
Next, the Audio Volume widget which got small textual headers for audio input and output device sections, last week, has received several small visual tweaks. For one, the mute button is now indented to align with the radio button's label.
The team also replaced the hamburger icon for item-specific menus in the Audio Volume widget with a three-dot/kebab icon.
Looking further out to Plasma 6.5.0, development continues on several UI enhancements. The Sticky Note widget is being reworked for panel use, with smaller resizing, context menu colors, and a true transparent background. System Settings will warn against using "Display" fonts for global settings, as they are poor for screen text.
The Emoji Picker (Meta+.) will now open showing all emojis on first launch, not an empty "Recent" page. The Networks widget's "Hotspot" button will always be visible, grayed out with a tooltip when unavailable, and debugging effects are moving to the KWin debug window.
Plasma 6.4.0 will also deliver many important bug fixes. A critical one addresses a rare flaw that could bypass the lock screen's password. System Settings stability will improve, fixing crashes from refresh rate changes or dragging LibreOffice content. A WINE application freeze with custom window decorations is also being resolved. The color picker gets more accuracy with features like Night Light or HDR, and custom panel resize handles will work better. System Monitor sees fixes for network speed sorting, data display, and widget configurations. Finally, wallpaper grid previews will adjust their aspect ratio in real time if the screen's aspect changes, complementing dynamic wallpapers.
Performance work continues. For Plasma 6.4.0, the clipboard popup (Meta+V) will appear faster, and non-native screen resolutions will see less performance penalty.
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