KDE Plasma continues improving to stop you breaking things

Developer Nate Graham has highlighted more recent work for the KDE Plasma desktop environment (the one the Steam Deck will come with) and it’s all sounding great.

Continuing their effort to prevent breakage, just like stopping the Discover software centre removing your desktop, Discover now cannot uninstall itself. That’s right, previously Discover was able to end up removing itself from your desktop! Now though, it won’t as there’s new checks in place.

Discover is also seeing something of a UI overhaul now too for application pages. So when you click on something in Discover you’re interested in installing, you’ll now get clearer information on each app like the size and version information.

It’s really nice to see so much effort being put into Discover, since that is the way users are supposed to find and install apps on Plasma. Even more fixes came in like it no longer crashing when you install or uninstall more than one Flatpak app at once, showing the correct size for “very very large” packages, a better screenshot pop-up for applications when you’re viewing their page and the list goes on.

Wayland improvements continued apace too like Kate (the text editor) no longer flashes when you hit Ctrl+S to save your changes and dragging-and-dropping various things to XWayland apps no longer sometimes makes them stop accepting clicks until the system is restarted.

Dolphin (the file manager) improvements coming along too like it no longer crashing if you cancel an archiving job in the middle that was initiated from one of Dolphin’s context menu “Compress” items. The list goes on, as Graham mentions the blog posts only scratch the surface of the working going into KDE Plasma.