KDE developer Nate Graham describes this week as having seen a “massive amount of stability work” for the Plasma 6.5 desktop. Among the many fixes to land this week for this next Plasma desktop release were fixing the second and third most common causes of Plasma crashes. Additionally, the most prolific common crash scenario was discovered to be caused by third-party code.
The number one common cause of Plasma crashes is reported to be within the KDE wallpaper engine and has been attributed to more than five thousand crashes in the past 90 days. The third-party code appears to be one of the Plasma desktop plug-ins.
Plasma 6.5 this week saw multiple KWin crash fixes, a case where the KDE XDG portal could crash, a clipboard issue with XWayland, other XWayland bugs fixed like app flickering, and various other fixes.
Plasma 6.5 also landed an UI improvement of being able to activate the sleep / shutdown / restart buttons in Kickoff using the enter key as an alternative to the spacebar.
For the Plasma 6.4.6 point release meanwhile KWin’s CPU usage will be “substantially” reduced while playing fullscreen video.
More details on the KDE Plasma 6.5 bug fixing this week via blogs.kde.org.