KDE improves support for floating videos on Wayland among this week's new features

KDE Everything is ready for the release of Plasma 6.4, scheduled for next Tuesday. Now it's time to look more closely to the future, although in this week's news release we continue to find changes that will arrive in that version 6.4 and in 6.3.6, which, starting Tuesday, will become the most stable option for those who prefer to be conservative.

Before starting with the new features, let's discuss the first point: improved support for PiP in Wayland. If we open a session in X11 and launch a video in Firefox, in the bottom panel we'll see that there's only one instance of the browser. If we do the same in Wayland, we'll see two. This new feature improves support in Wayland, so we assume the behavior will be the same. Now, let's get to the details. news this week.

New Features Coming to KDE

plasma 6.5.0

• Support for an experimental version of the Wayland picture-in-picture protocol has been implemented, allowing applications that also implement it (such as Firefox) to properly display PiP windows before the official version of the protocol is merged.

KDE User Interface Improvements

• In Plasma 6.3.6, the speed at which the "visual bell" accessibility feature can flash the screen has been reduced to avoid any possibility of causing seizures.

plasma 6.4.0

• The Kicker app launcher widget can now scroll horizontally when searches return results from multiple KRunner add-ons, so you can see them all.

plasma 6.4.1

• Text contrast has been improved in labels used in subtitles or other secondary roles throughout Plasma.

• Discover's search field now removes leading and trailing whitespace to prevent errors when pasting text containing trailing spaces or other unnecessary characters.

KDE Plasma 6.5.0

• In System Preferences, the color inversion and zoom settings have been moved to the Accessibility page, which is a more logical location than the old Desktop Effects page.

• The KWin Background Contrast effect has been merged with the Blur effect, as it doesn't make sense to turn them on or off separately.
• On Wayland, virtual desktops can now be reordered from the Pager widget, and reordering them in the grid view of the Overview effect also reorders them in the Pager widget.
• Spectacle now more clearly informs users that a screen recording can be ended by pressing the same keyboard shortcut used to start it, by displaying it in the notification, and by using clearer names for global shortcuts.
• Breeze-style animated effects when clicking checkboxes and radio buttons now also work in QtQuick-based applications and System Preferences pages.
• The Disks & Devices, Networks, and Bluetooth widgets now use standard-style section headers.
• The search experience in the emoji picker app has been improved: the search field is now always visible, and searching will explore the full set of emoji if there are no matches on the current page.
• The Display Settings widget and OSD no longer assume the primary display is connected to a laptop; more generic terminology is now used.

Performance and technical changes in KDE

plasma 6.4.0

• The startup speed of System Monitor has been improved by loading the contents of the column configuration box on demand, rather than at startup.
• The Environment Canada data source for weather reports has been ensured to continue operating, as the provider will soon be changing its data format and adaptation was necessary.

Framework 6.15

• The startup speed of System Monitor has been improved by loading the tree view indicator arrows on demand, rather than at startup.