This Week in Plasma: Shadows for Steam and Discord

Source Summary

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma! This week the bug-fixing spree of the past few weeks wound down as feature work and user interface polishing moved into the foreground. So let’s start out with something pretty darn user-visible: Notable new features Plasma 6.8 KWin now automatically applies a shadow, outline, and corner rounding effect to client-side-decorated windows that lack these — such as Steam and Discord windows. Read more about this on Vlad’s blog ! (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #9147 , kwin MR #9566 , breeze MR #612 , and kdecoration MR #93 ) You can now assign processes to specific CPUs or groups of CPUs in System Monitor, known as setting CPU affinity. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #429151 ) The Task Manager widget now has global shortcuts for re-arranging tasks and switching between them. (Salman Farooq, plasma-desktop MR #3819 ) Notable UI improvements Plasma 6.7.4 Apps using the global shortcuts portal are now allowed to rename their shortcuts by requesting to re-register them. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #523063 ) Plasma 6.8 System Settings’ Window Behavior page has been ported to QML and modernized a bit in the process, bringing it up to par with most other pages in System Settings. (Tobias Ozór, kwin MR #9370 ) Notable bug fixes Plasma 6.6.7 System Settings’ Effects page now behaves properly for KWin effects whose default values have been overridden at the distribution level. (Nicolas Fella, kwin MR #8112 ) Plasma 6.7.3 Fixed a recent regression that made the ksystemstats process sometimes crash when the system woke from sleep. (Iyán Méndez Veiga, KDE Bugzilla #521353 ) Fixed a recent regression that caused lag and stuttering on certain websites using hardware-accelerated rendering for systems using certain GPUs. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #521742 ) Fixed a weird issue that made the system stop sleeping according to the normal schedule if you interrupted certain monitors while they were right in the middle of shutting down. (Ameen Al-Asady, KDE Bugzilla #523001 ) Plasma 6.7.4 Fixed a somewhat common way that Discover could crash while installing updates. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Bugzilla #522255 ) The bandwidth usage reported by Plasma’s remote desktop server is now accurate. (Liu Jie, krdp MR #216 ) Fixed a layout glitch on System Settings’ Pointers page that prevented some pointer size options from being fully visible when using screen scaling. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #521187 ) Fixed two layout glitches in Discover when using the app with multiple backends and looking at large items on the Installed page. (Nate Graham, discover MR #1357 and discover MR #1358 ) The “Typing on the desktop activates KRunner” setting is now fully respected for Folder View widgets placed on the desktop, in addition to the embedded Folder View that is the desktop. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #523053 ) Plasma 6.8 Fixed some positioning and theme compatibility issues with drop-down menus in Plasma and its widgets. (Filip Fila, libplasma MR #1546 ) Notable in performance & technical Frameworks 6.29 Reduced Plasma’s memory usage a little bit. (Nicolas Fella, ksvg MR #113 and kguiaddons MR #224 ) KDE Gear 26.12 System Settings’ Connection Preferences page has been removed. Its settings were extremely esoteric and they applied to almost nothing these days, so the page was mostly just cluttering the place up. (Tobias Fella, kio-extras MR #533 ) 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 .