KDE brings UI improvements, bug fixes and more to Plasma 6.4 as stable release draws near

With less than a month to the release of Plasma 6.4, the KDE dev team has shared what it has been working on in the latest issue of its weekly roundup. The update shows a heavy focus on user interface polish and a whole slew of bug fixes as the June 17 release date gets closer.

The team has pushed a number of UI refinements for the upcoming version. On the System Settings page for Wi-Fi, the network list can now be fully navigated with a keyboard. KDE also disabled the ability to drag and drop displays on top of one another in the monitor settings. This was done because it could create unsupported arrangements that triggered a cascade of strange bugs throughout the system.

Waking up a sleeping computer by pressing the power button no longer causes the bizarre logout screen to appear after you unlock it, which is a relief. Alignment issues in the settings page for the Digital Clock widget were also resolved.

The list of bug fixes for 6.4 is extensive. The development team has fixed the most common crash affecting the System Monitor and squashed another one related to a divide-by-zero error. For users with multiple monitors, a long-awaited fix has landed that prevents windows from disappearing when the screen they are on gets disconnected.

Even the humble Sticky Notes widget received attention; it will no longer freeze the Plasma shell if you place it on a very thick panel. Discover, the software center, also had a bug patched that caused it to crash if closed too quickly after launch. Here's the full list of improvements:

• Putting a Sticky Note widget on a very thick panel can no longer cause Plasma to freeze; now, you can use a thick panel with a sticky note on it as a notes sidebar.
• Fixed the most common System Monitor crash.
• Fixed another crash in System Monitor, this time a divide-by-zero.
• Fixed a case where xdg-desktop-portal-kde could crash after you choose a video source to start streaming.
• Fixed a bug that caused Discover to crash if you close it immediately after it launched.
• Fixed multiple subtle bugs with the screen chooser widget and OSD that caused it to do the wrong thing on rotated screens or when mirroring screens.
• Fixed a bug that caused the System Settings’ search field not to be focused properly when pressing Ctrl+F while any UI elements in a settings page already had focus.
• Fixed the root cause of multiple issues involving windows disappearing when you disconnect the screen they’re on.
• Clicking a button on a desktop widget that opens a menu no longer inappropriately makes the widget enter Widget Edit Mode.
• Files with a # or ? character in their name or full path are no longer unexpectedly missing from the history lists in Kicker/Kickoff/etc launchers.
• Fixed a bug that caused the screen chooser window to sometimes not appear as expected when OBS was launched.
• Fixed a bug that caused tiled windows on a multi-screen setup to lose their tiling settings when the system went to sleep and woke up again.
• The "Move window to [activity]" feature now works properly when invoked from the Task Manager widget.
• Fixed a bug in the Kicker Application Menu that caused keyboard navigation not to work if the popup opened with an item under the pointer.
• In the Overview effect’s grid view, dragging windows tiled on one virtual desktop over to a different virtual desktop now keeps them tiled as expected.

The focus may be on the imminent 6.4 release, but work on what comes next never really stops. Looking ahead, development on Plasma 6.5 is already well underway. Just last week, the KDE team brought several performance improvements to Plasma 6.5.0.

This week, the team fixed a nagging bug that sometimes caused the Networks widget to think a hotspot was still enabled after disconnecting from Wi-Fi. On the features side, the System Settings' Fonts page now prevents you from breaking your system entirely by setting fonts below 4pt.

In addition to that, switching time spans in the Info Center’s energy page now features smooth graph animations.

Performance-wise, kwriteconfig should also be faster, allowing changes you made to the keyboard layout using the tool to reflect immediately.

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