Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma! This week Plasma 6.7 entered its “soft feature freeze” where we stop merging newly-written features and focus on finishing up and merging the ones that were already in flight. As such, some nice new features that have been in development for quite some time were merged this week! In addition, Plasma got a number of nice quality-of-life UI improvements and some accessibility fixes, among other changes. A good haul this week: Notable new features Plasma 6.7 Implemented support for the “Background apps” portal. This allows apps (especially newer GNOME apps) that use this portal to put themselves in the background and appear as icons in the System Tray, alongside the similar icons for other apps that use the existing System Tray icon functionality. (David Redondo, plasma-workspace MR #5703) Implemented an up-scaling feature for screen content when using KWin’s Zoom effect. The filter does its best to sharpen and upscale content, resulting in a smoother and less blocky appearance, especially at relatively high zoom levels. If this effect isn’t for you, you can turn it off. (Ritchie Frodomar, KDE Bugzilla #509770) 
Medium magnification 
High magnification 
Massive magnification The Printers widget is now badged with the number of active and queued print jobs. (Mike Noe, print-manager MR #323) 
Notable UI improvements Plasma 6.7 XWayland-using software that asks to be able to send synthetic keyboard and mouse events (such as xdotool, which it turns out a bunch of apps invoke) is now identified by name so you know what’s asking. In addition, you can see a list of apps you’ve given this permission to, and revoke it later. (David Redondo, kwin MR #9123) 
Implemented some KDE styling to the generic MessageDialog component from Qt, which resolves the issue of these dialogs looking really ugly and out of place in various pieces of software, including the Sticky Note widget’s deletion confirmation dialog. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #499562) 
After 
Before Improved how Discover handles being launched with no internet connection. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #511002) 
Improved how Discover communicates that a firmware update has been queued for installation after the next restart. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #422498) Removed the “double back button” effect visible in the Networks widget when showing a network’s QR code. (Tobias Fella, plasma-nm MR #541) Made the automatic screen brightness feature take into account more data points, hopefully making it more responsive to your desires and less swingy when in an environment where the background lighting is changing a lot. (Prajna Sariputra, kwin MR #9145) Made the buttons at the top of the Widget Explorer sidebar respect Fitts’ Law, allowing you to activate them by jamming the pointer against the adjacent screen edge and clicking. (Tobias Fella, plasma-desktop MR #3511 and libplasma MR #1479) 
Streamlined the presentation of the notification about your KDE-Connect-connected phone being low on battery power. (Kai Uwe Broulik, powerdevil MR #619) You now have more than 25 seconds to pick a color once you’ve invoked this from the Color Picker widget. Now you can take as long as you like. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kdeplasma-addons MR #1013) Frameworks 6.26 Improved the appearance of the cross-fade transition when moving between pages in many Kirigami-based apps. (HeCheng Yu, kirigami MR #2079) Notable bug fixes Plasma 6.6.5 Fixed an issue that made Plasma Login Manager fail to launch properly on certain devices with certain graphics hardware — in particular Apple silicon laptops. (Matthias Kurz, plasma-login-manager MR #130) Fixed an issue that made touches on a touchscreen stop applying to the correct part of the screen when the touchscreen was mirrored to another screen with different geometry. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #514688) Made it possible to select a sound theme using the keyboard. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #519194) Fixed a visual glitch on System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page that made the lines indicating mappings for stylus buttons fly off the top-left corner of the window with certain tablets. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #519600) Plasma 6.7 Fixed a case where KWin could crash when activating an item on a hidden panel while using the in-development Vulkan rendering backend. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #518721) Fixed two cases of controls on System Settings’ Quick Settings page not being read by the Orca screen reader. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #519433) Disabling KRunner plugins globally now turns them off in the Kicker Application Menu widget, too. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #501200) Notable in performance & technical Plasma 6.6.5 Fixed some performance issues experienced on a variety of NVIDIA GPUs that were introduced by version 595 of the proprietary NVIDIA driver. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #517987) Plasma 6.7 Implemented support for renaming or relocating the new cross-desktop standard “Projects” folder that’s started to appear in people’s home folders. (Jakob Dev, plasma-desktop MR #3657) 
Implemented version 2 of the “Input Capture” portal. (David Redondo, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #493) How you can help KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable. Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team! Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist. You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keeps KDE bringing Free Software to the world. To get a new Plasma feature or a bug fix mentioned here Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org...