Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in Plasma"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.
So much nice-ness!
A small request: make it possible to disable all the eye candy at once. (If there’s a way to do this, I don’t see it.) I prefer disabling almost everything, but having to go through and uncheck one by one is a pain. All at once would let me just pick the 3 or 4 that I keep active.
Thanks for all the goodness!
Unlikely to be implemented, this is highly specific, as we maintain a set default settings that are a huge majority of users expect.
And even then the “eye-candiness” boundaries are not clear.
You can save the config files to reproduce a set of options to a another computer without having to tweak configuration again.
The link for this change is wrong.
Hello, I am not too familiar with plasma’s release cycle but I am currently struggling with the way spectacle works. Creating a screenshot feels clunky and slow (when I click rectangle selection the screen goes dark but I have to wait ~3s before I can actually start selecting).
What I can see from the video in the blog is that this will be fixed. But could anyone explain to me when I can expect to see that change actually being released??
I believe you have a delay time set to a few seconds in Spectacle. That is not how it works or behaves at all.
The planned release date of 6.4 is some time away, on 2025-06-17.
Good call! Fixed in TWiP 2025-03-01: correct Yifan's KWin change URL (95572cd1) · Commits · Websites / Contributor Blogs · GitLab.
In the case of Spectacle, take the example of Flameshot, I use it to replace Spectacle
Can you describe what Flameshot does better than Spectacle that makes you prefer it?
Sadly this still does not fix bug 494674. Making plasma pretty much unusable.
I don’t think it was intended to, right?
Sorry that issue happening to you. Thankfully the issue is not universally reproducible or else it really would make Plasma unusable (and hence would have been fixed immediately). The fact that it’s not universal means there must be something about your specific hardware and software setup that triggers it.
Obviously we should fix it anyway, and I have confidence that this will eventually happen.
No, it was not intented to, but I was really thrilled when I read the changelog and it sounded like the exact same issue I had.
I am actually not sure what triggers it either, it does not happen on my laptop, only on my desktop after upgrading to plasma 6 (running debian with an intel gpu).
The crash happens when hiding the outline of the window overlay somehow when using Q_EMIT, but not a QT developer at all, no clue how to debug this.
Fixed an issue that could cause the brightness level of an external screen to forget its prior value and reset to 100% every time it went to sleep and woke up. (Jakob Petsovits, link)
Nope, that was also Xaver. I did some initial debugging to narrow the issue down to KWin but while I took my sweet time setting up an environment for KWin debugging, he identified and fixed the issue in time for 6.3.2. Go Xaver!
Oops! Corrected in TWiP 2025-03-01: correct brightness change to attribute it to Xaver (98403d06) · Commits · Websites / Contributor Blogs · GitLab
Huh, does this happen in 6.3.2 too? The flush mentioned in 494674 – Crash when maximizing window should be gone now.
Take a look at Konsave.
I set up my Plasma desktop with a comfortable theme - and that (for me) includes everything from Kate, Konsole, various other settings/themes and layouts.
I can then do konsave -s good.
Next, I could ‘disable all the eye candy’ - whatever that might mean. Then I would do konsave -s ugly
To switch then, you can just do:
konsave -a ugly && systemctl --user restart plasma-plasmashell.service
Doing a plasma restart helps apply themes etc.
Is the change mentioned backported to 6.3.2? I could not find it in the git history. I did compile from master and when snapping the window to the top screen edge it freezes for a second and when doing it again kwin_wayland crashes (I always got one try before noticing it does not work). I built from latest master (just now) and it is still happending because an event is sent, but indeed. The flush is gone:
Here is the updated stack trace:
#7 0x00007f2a3fa6d29c in QSGThreadedRenderLoop::handleObscurity (this=0x55dfa8fd2b30, w=0x55dfa8f64fd0) at ./src/quick/scenegraph/qsgthreadedrenderloop.cpp:1362
#8 0x00007f2a3de1bc2c in QWindow::event (this=0x55dfa8e2de40, ev=0x7ffc67ed2a80) at ./src/gui/kernel/qwindow.cpp:2600
#9 0x00007f2a3e9b20a2 in QApplicationPrivate::notify_helper(QObject*, QEvent*) () at /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt6Widgets.so.6
#10 0x00007f2a3d787928 in QCoreApplication::notifyInternal2 (receiver=0x55dfa8e2de40, event=0x7ffc67ed2a80) at ./src/corelib/kernel/qcoreapplication.cpp:1142
#11 0x00007f2a3d787e0d in QCoreApplication::sendSpontaneousEvent (receiver=<optimized out>, event=<optimized out>) at ./src/corelib/kernel/qcoreapplication.cpp:1597
#12 0x00007f2a3ddd229b in QGuiApplicationPrivate::processExposeEvent (e=0x7ffc67ed2b20) at ./src/gui/kernel/qguiapplication.cpp:3298
#13 0x00007f2a3de28e88 in QWindowSystemEventHandler::sendEvent (this=<optimized out>, e=0x7ffc67ed2b20) at ./src/gui/kernel/qwindowsysteminterface.cpp:190
#14 QWindowSystemHelper<QWindowSystemInterface::SynchronousDelivery>::handleEvent<QWindowSystemInterfacePrivate::ExposeEvent, QWindow*, QRegion> () at ./src/gui/kernel/qwindowsysteminterface.cpp:102
#15 0x00007f2a3de1c6d1 in QWindowSystemHelper<QWindowSystemInterface::DefaultDelivery>::handleEvent<QWindowSystemInterfacePrivate::ExposeEvent, QWindow*, QRegion> () at ./src/gui/kernel/qwindowsysteminterface.cpp:80
#16 handleWindowSystemEvent<QWindowSystemInterfacePrivate::ExposeEvent, QWindowSystemInterface::DefaultDelivery, QWindow*, QRegion> () at ./src/gui/kernel/qwindowsysteminterface.cpp:138
#17 QWindowSystemInterface::handleExposeEvent<QWindowSystemInterface::DefaultDelivery> (window=0x55dfa8e2de40, region=...) at ./src/gui/kernel/qwindowsysteminterface.cpp:337
#18 0x000055df716f3bf7 in KWin::QPA::Window::unmap (this=0x55dfa8c7b650) at /home/moritz/kde/src/kwin/src/plugins/qpa/window.cpp:176
#19 0x00007f2a3de13268 in QWindowPrivate::setVisible (this=0x55dfa8c91310, visible=false) at ./src/gui/kernel/qwindow.cpp:420
#20 0x00007f2a3f28d0a8 in QQmlPropertyData::writeProperty (this=<optimized out>, target=<optimized out>, value=<optimized out>, flags=...) at ./src/qml/qml/qqmlpropertydata_p.h:336
#21 0x00007f2a3f2a3c5e in GenericBinding<1>::doStore<bool> (this=<optimized out>, value=<optimized out>, pd=<optimized out>, flags=...) at ./src/qml/qml/qqmlbinding.cpp:275
#22 GenericBinding<1>::write (this=0x55dfa8fe60b0, result=..., isUndefined=false, flags=...) at ./src/qml/qml/qqmlbinding.cpp:238
#23 0x00007f2a3f2a010d in QQmlBinding::doUpdate (this=0x55dfa8fe60b0, watcher=..., flags=..., scope=<optimized out>) at ./src/qml/qml/qqmlbinding.cpp:701
#24 0x00007f2a3f29d4a4 in QQmlBinding::update (this=0x55dfa8fe60b0, flags=...) at ./src/qml/qml/qqmlbinding.cpp:164
#25 0x00007f2a3f317157 in QQmlNotifier::emitNotify (endpoint=<optimized out>, a=0x0) at ./src/qml/qml/qqmlnotifier.cpp:70
#26 0x00007f2a3d7d57d0 in doActivate<false> (sender=0x55dfa8ce9980, signal_index=3, argv=0x0) at ./src/corelib/kernel/qobject.cpp:3976
#27 0x00007f2a403f264d in KWin::Outline::hide (this=0x55dfa8ce9980) at /home/moritz/kde/src/kwin/src/outline.cpp:58
#28 0x00007f2a404efe36 in KWin::Window::finishInteractiveMoveResize (this=0x55dfa97ff830, cancel=false) at /home/moritz/kde/src/kwin/src/window.cpp:1198
#29 0x00007f2a404f0362 in KWin::Window::endInteractiveMoveResize (this=0x55dfa97ff830) at /home/moritz/kde/src/kwin/src/window.cpp:2759
#30 0x00007f2a4037c0d1 in KWin::MoveResizeFilter::pointerButton (this=<optimized out>, event=<optimized out>) at /home/moritz/kde/src/kwin/src/input.cpp:691
Yes, it was backported to 6.3.2. No crash happens on my machine. Perhaps it’s due to some option or something (there are a lot of them, which makes reproducing bugs hard sometimes; it would be appreciated if you find what’s special about your setup that kwin crashes)
Thought I’d chip in as well since you asked. I had a look at Spectacle years ago when I started with KDE and felt it to be quite convoluted. When I found Flameshot I liked how clean the UI was and that it had all the tools I needed right there.
Your write up higher up got me interested so I installed Spectacle again.
I can see that now tools like numbering, etc. are available in Spectacle as well, but visually things are still quite different.
Spectacle:
Flameshot:
From a feature point of view it seems both applications are very similar by now.
