KDE is bringing memory optimizations and more to Plasma 6.5

The KDE team has released the latest issue of This Week in Plasma, and it's packed with goodies. Most of the current effort is focused on polishing Plasma 6.4, as shown by yesterday's Plasma 6.4 Beta 2 release with bug fixes and improvements like smarter Bluetooth with better device recognition and easier pairing. At the same time, the latest report gives us a tantalizing look at what's cooking for Plasma 6.5.

The big headliner for Plasma 6.5 has to be memory optimization. The developers are working to reduce Plasma's memory footprint by making it smarter about how it handles wallpapers. Apparently, Plasma has been keeping a few too many unnecessary copies of each screen's wallpaper sitting in memory, and fixing that should make the whole desktop feel a bit lighter and snappier.

Beyond that, 6.5 is also set to introduce the ability to advance your wallpaper slideshow with a keyboard shortcut. KWin's Magnifier and Zoom effects will also get smarter, sharing their initial zoom level and zoom factor settings, making them more consistent to use. The Digital Clock widget's calendar add-ons page is getting a visual makeover, and Plasma will even start warning you if you crank up the "Raise maximum volume" setting for too long, reminding you it is for temporary boosts and could damage your speakers.

Plus, the System Settings page for Legacy X11 App Support is being made clearer about its purpose and security implications, and the menu you get when clicking an app icon in a window's titlebar will now be consistently called the "Window Menu" everywhere.

Behind all this desktop goodness are regular updates to KDE Frameworks and Qt, the core libraries that KDE software depends on. For example, Frameworks 6.15 is fixing some annoying KWin crashes, glitches that made KWallet freeze, and a bug that turned some Breeze icons into plain white squares in GTK 3 apps.

On the Qt side, version 6.8.4 tackles one of the most common random crashes in QtQuick-based KDE apps, bringing a big boost in stability across the board. Looking ahead, Qt 6.10 will fix the issue where context menus pop up in the wrong spot on multi-screen setups.

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