This Week in Plasma: Refinements All Around - KDE Blogs

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.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blogs.kde.org/2025/02/22/this-week-in-plasma-refinements-all-around
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Nate, you didn’t mention this bug possibly getting fixed for 6.3.2:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=500452

I would like to thank Fushan Wen for looking at this so quickly!

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Nate usually talks about fixes when they’ve landed in master, not before. Great to see another bug on its way to being squashed though.

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I see no mention of reverting the audio icon in the panel :confused: Plenty of people already shown their dissatisfaction with not being able to disable it entirely in the relevant bug report.
Also, has anyone else reported the buggy behavior in dragging widgets on the panel?

Wasn’t the final Wayland color management protocol backported to 6.3, or am I somehow misreading the commit? Commit hash 88840fe1c2107b108a61525822e2ec2733eb9854

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The audio device icon is a topic that’s being discussed internally, and we have a plan to restore the possibility of hiding it entirely. See Rethink 'Mark applications that play audio' (!2590) · Merge requests · Plasma / Plasma Desktop · GitLab.

The panel drag issue is likely 500293 – In Panel edit mode, dragging widgets items over a Task Manager causes the widget to get stuck (until restarting plasmashell) and a Task starts getting dragged instead, which is marked as high priority and being actively investigated.

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Excellent! Thank you for the links.

If I may add, I completely agree with your opinion below on tackling the underlying bugs that make the audio icon display unnecessarily.

People seem to be wanting to remove the icon to work around these bugs:
Bug 472539 - audio icon inappropriately shown for all Chromium/Electron apps when one is playing audio
Bug 463356 - audio icon inappropriately shown for all Flatpak apps when one is playing audio
Bug 375943 - audio icon inappropriately shown for all windows of single-PID-multi-window app when only one is playing audio.
I suspect if we manage to fix all of those, the demand for being able to hide the audio icon entirely will drop to a low level. Possibly not to zero, but at least to a lower level than right now.

In my personal use case of relying on a lot of PWAs, it is bothersome to have all of them display the audio icon due to each web app belonging to the same PID of Chromium. If these 3 bugs you listed were fixed I would not mind having the audio icons enabled, as they would likely be useful to be aware of a sound event or notification. But at the same time, they don’t seem trivial to solve.

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Yeah, basically we underestimated the annoyance of those bugs that people were using it to work around. Even if they were all fixed (which, as you note, is indeed not trivial), there would probably be residual demand for disabling the indicators entirely.

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