KDE Plasma developers this week focused a lot on improving performance, fixing bugs, and enhancing the user interface. KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly report to highlight all of these interesting Plasma changes for the week.
Highlights for KDE Plasma developments this week were still quite notable even with being focused more on bug fixing and polishing. Some of the KDE Plasma highlights this week included:
– Plasma 6.5’s Ocean sound theme has updated its volume change feedback sound so it doesn’t sound as harsh.
– Plasma 6.5 will now show a system notification when you plug-in a device. This was primarily done in the name of accessibility as per EU Directive 2019/882 compliance. Nate Graham commented that there was work to ensure that these notifications would not be annoying. Here’s one of his examples:
– There were also accessibility improvements to the KDE System Settings’ Flatpak Permissions page.
– Removing of all colorful third-party app icons from the Breeze icon theme. This was done for not wanting to override the branding of third-party apps as well as lacking the resources to maintain all of these third-party icons where their branding may change over time. This affects many apps such as for LibreOffice, AnyDesk, Audacity, Atom, GIMP, FileZIlla, Emacs, Keepass, MATLAB, Mixxx, Scribus, Sublime, Diaspora, and many others.
– With KDE Gear 25.12, Konsole and the Kate text editor can now pass Wayland activation tokens back and forth.
– Plasma 6.4.5 fixes an issue where KWin would lag and stutter when changing the brightness on a laptop with an Intel CPU from the Tigerlake era or later.
– Many other bug fixes.
More details on these changes via Nate’s blog.
