Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
…but before we start, here’s a quick reminder that we’ve entered the last week to submit your proposal for the next KDE Goals cycle! If you’re not ready to champion a goal, you can still get involved by joining one of the existing proposals as a contributor or supporter.
Just a honest question, why is Emoji Resizing the headline here? I find Xavier’s work much more interesting and it feels very much buried under minor UI and UX changes!
Feels like KDE is slowly entering stagnation phase. Not many new UI features getting introduced. KDE still has some features missing for Panel/Dock functionality. Last bigger feature was windows finally getting bottom rounded corners. And as one youtuber once said, “KDE is very nice but it still has that feeling of not being complete”. Is this happening because lacking resources/developers or something else?
Be aware that this is the summer period and I’d believe quite a bit of devs would be on vacation and thus also taking a break from contributing. On the non-dev side, there’s also the 30th KDE Anniversary for which some people are working extra for, with Akademy and surely some other stuff (it’s quite a milestone!)
Regarding UI features, I’d say there’s two things causing it to stagnate, user-facing wise:
Anyway there’s still movement happening under the hood and KDE is not only Plasma, but I’d say we’re always lacking devs in open source spaces 
It’s funny; when I report on big fancy features, inevitably at least one person will comment something like “Why doesn’t KDE focus on just fixing bugs for a while? It’s so unstable!” And this week when there were lots of bug fixes and performance improvement, the lack of big new features is “stagnation.” 
Ultimately what gets worked on is what the volunteers wanted to work on plus what the paid contributors were paid to work on. Those things don’t always show up as flashy new features week after week. There’s always a lot going on in the background to prepare for big things, and also don’t forget this report is only about Plasma. Lots of interesting things happening in the app world, too.
Honestly, like any other update, really great work on this one to all the KDE devs! My favourite parts of the additions and changes mentioned in the blog are the smaller UI refinements and more bug fixes. With how things have been going, it doesn’t seem like Plasma is going to stop getting better, to be honest.
Very awesome stuff!! 
It is also very easy to miss stuff.
KDE has such a wide product portfolio that there are tons of release notes to dig through and even those might not list everything.
Some people might only read summaries or reports on news sites and miss a lot of details not covered by those.
Indeed. “This Week in Plasma” is a high level summary of user-facing changes in Plasma that I and other contributors noticed and deemed to be news-worthy. It’s always just the tip of the iceberg.
I think this is a fantastic addition! The emojis are a bit small on my monitor and this fixes that problem! 
Can we also have a favourites emoji section where we can drag and drop the emojis that we spam use the most? 