A new week has begun and the team of KDE has shared the new weekly report Regarding the progress in its desktop environment, it is setting a frenetic pace of development in anticipation of the expected launch of Plasma 6.8 on October 14th.
This week, improvements have focused on refining the user experience, expanding the capabilities of integrated tools, and addressing minor issues that affected daily use, demonstrating that the desktop continues to mature steadily.
This week has been incredibly busy! We have great new sharing features, improved theme support, UI enhancements, bug fixes… and much more! This is one of those weeks with something for everyone, even those who are particular about software dependencies.
Audio recording in Spectacle and improvements to the System Monitor
Within the report, the developers highlight one of the most celebrated additions in this cycle, which directly affects Spectacle, the popular screenshot tool. Starting with Plasma 6.8, users will have the ability to record audio while creating screencasts.. This functionality It is not limited to a single source since it allows you to capture ambient sound through the microphone, record internal audio emitted by system applications, or even combine both simultaneously.
To round out the improvements in this application, the Developers have managed to implement a high-performance native blur effect, This has allowed us to completely eliminate the dependence on the heavy OpenCV library, thus lightening the weight of the software.
Control over team resources also received several improvements, as the The system monitor is now able to read and display video memory usage (VRAM) as a percentage of the total available memory, replicating the behavior that already existed for traditional RAM, which will be extremely useful for gamers and design professionals. On the configuration side, the The page dedicated to remote desktop connections has been redesigned to properly fit smaller windows. ensuring that the interface does not break when used on devices with small screens or mobile phones.
Visual adjustments, theme integration, and distribution support
The combo box dropdown menus (comboboxes) They have abandoned their old fixed style to embrace the active Plasma theme, allowing its pop-up windows to look exactly the same as the rest of the system, as well as disabling their appearance animations to maintain consistency with other interface elements.
Along the same lines, the update to KDE Frameworks 6.29 ensures that icon lists and grids in QML applications adopt the visual style of the active application, abandoning the forced Breeze default style. And speaking of Breeze, the popular icon theme has expanded its catalog by adding official images for packaged Android applications and Typst documents.
Finally, usability and compatibility with different Linux distributions have also been a focus. users of operating systems based on older versions of systemd, as is the case with KDE neon, You can now fully enjoy the automatic login feature thanks to the corrections implemented in the Plasma Login Manager.
In terms of touch response and hardwareThe annoying delay that occurred between moving the brightness slider in the widget and the actual change has been eliminated. of external monitors. In addition, bugs that prevented interaction with the overview and tiled layout using styluses in Wayland sessions have been fixed, demonstrating KDE's commitment to providing a smooth experience regardless of the input device.
Regarding the corrections made to the different versions:
- The Media Frame widget no longer displays one image and then another in a slightly sharp and distorted way.
- A recent regression that prevented closing windows in the Overview overlay by clicking the middle mouse button was corrected.
- A few minor design errors have been fixed in the Color Picker widget, so it should now always be the same size as in Plasma 6.6.
- A recent regression in an X11 session was corrected that caused icons for all running Flatpak applications to appear unnecessarily in the system tray.
- A bug related to scrolling in the System Monitor's "Configure Columns" pop-up window has been fixed, and it now displays as a traditional window.
- In the Networks widget, when connecting to a network that you do not have permission to edit, all other available networks no longer appear incorrectly as connected.
Finally, if you are interested in learning more about it, you can consult the details at the following link.