KDE Plasma 6.5 will notify you if your printer's ink is low

This week, the KDE team continued work on the upcoming Plasma 6.5.0 as well as Plasma 6.4's fourth bug fix release, 6.4.4. As usual, both Plasma versions saw several UI tweaks, bug fixes, and performance improvements. The most notable changes are discussed in this article.

Let's start with Plasma 6.5. The desktop environment is getting a useful feature that tells you when your printer is low on ink.

This works by having the system check the Common Unix Printing System, or CUPS, for marker levels after a print job is created or completed. CUPS stores attributes like marker-levels in its printers.conf file, and once a level is determined to be low, it triggers a marker-supply-low-warning that Plasma will now use to inform you.

UI improvements scheduled for 6.5 include disabling key repeat for certain global shortcuts, like toggling Overview, to prevent rapid screen flashing that could be a seizure risk. There is a better "Someone started sharing this screen" notification that now appears only after a connection is fully established.

You will also find standard KDE styling with the "Confirm deleting network connection" dialog, and more consistent spacing in the Global Menu widget. As for bug fixes in 6.5, a layout bug that caused visual overflow in the printer setup page has been corrected.

An issue that stopped you from using the virtual keyboard in the Application Dashboard search field is fixed, and XDG portal-using apps can now request screencasts of new virtual outputs. Finally, the clipboard configuration window's size and position information has been moved from the state config file to the settings file.

Moving on to 6.4.4, the hitboxes for desktop items now correctly match their visual styling. This means no more accidentally selecting an invisible box around a file. And when you mark a notification as low priority, it will now correctly appear in your history if it arrived during Do Not Disturb mode, so it does not just vanish.

If you're experiencing a Kwin crash on login, particularly in a QEMU virtual machine, 6.4.4 has a fix for that on the way. Other bug fixes 6.4.4 brings include:

• A fix for the Global Menu widget's single-button mode for X11 users.
• The search field in the Wayland version of the Global Menu widget works again.
• An annoying bug in the Global Shortcuts XDG portal that made apps think they had no shortcuts has been resolved.
• Plasma Browser Integration's built-in Share feature has been repaired.

Plasma 6.4.4 will drop on the 5th of next month. You can find more details on the official KDE Blog.