KDE fixes blurry screens by snapping near-1x scale factors back to 1x on Wayland

A new issue of This Week in Plasma is out, and it contains a nice mix of bug fixes for the recently released Plasma 6.4, UI improvements for the upcoming Plasma 6.5, and more.

To start with the big news, Plasma 6.4.3, scheduled to land on the 15th of this month, is going to tackle an annoying problem with display scaling. Specifically, the automatic scale factor calculator on Wayland will no longer suggest values that are just a little over 100%.

The new logic will instead round the calculated default scale factor down to a crisp 100% if it would otherwise be just barely over, as developer Nate Graham notes:

Scale factors close to 1 but not exactly 1 produce substantial blurriness. 1x looks much better for these cases, even if the cost is that things are a bit smaller than ideal.

Now, moving on to Plasma 6.5, which is planned for later this year, there are some useful quality-of-life changes. For instance, the popup preview for an empty folder on the desktop now shows a placeholder message so it is more obvious what you are looking at instead of just being a weird empty box.

The update also makes screencasts of a specific window include any popups that the window creates.

As for system audio, in Plasma 6.5, when you unmute the volume, it will now unmute all playback devices, not just the active one.

Plasma 6.5 is also getting a new virtual keyboard. The KDE team has been working on its own on-screen keyboard for a while now, aiming to eventually replace the current standard, Maliit. This is what the keyboard looks like at the moment:

For now, there are still issues like no input in Electron apps and other little quirks, which the KDE team hopes to fix in the future.

What is a "This Week in KDE" update without bug fixes? In Plasma 6.3.6, a fix landed landed to stop screen flicker when playing full-screen games after you have switched focus away from them.

Plasma 6.4.2, which we covered this week, brought a handful of its own fixes, like stopping KWin from crashing if you messed with Task Switcher shortcuts and restoring functionality for the Global Menu widget’s "Single button" mode.

And the upcoming 6.4.3 will be getting fixes for the Orca screen reader in Learn mode, a crash in the built-in RDP server when handling bad connections, and a fix for some issues where the screen would turn itself back on after being turned off.

And finally, Plasma 6.5 will bring a fix for a bug where hitting the escape key in the Wireguard VPN properties dialog could break it.

Other little improvements are landing in Frameworks 6.16 too, such as better sorting in open and save dialogs and improved detection of powerful GPUs for systems with more than one.