Tried out the new feature in Plasma 6.8, and everything looks so much more consistent now.

I even noticed that it works for turning OFF shadows for CSD windows with forced shadows, not just vice versa. Great work!

Hi everyone!

My experience on multi GPU setups like most gaming laptops has always been that kwin and plasmashell stay stuck on the integrated graphics despite the HDMI port being hard wired to the dGPU, even when I keep the integrated screen completely off.

The problem with this is that when you fire up a game on the dGPU it still needs to copy the frame to the iGPU for compositing (kwin) and draw stuff like the start menu (plasmashell) and then all the way back to the dGPU for transmitting over HDMI.

Now, migrating plasmashell is just a matter of restarting it with a different env var, and this tool does it, but kwin was impossible until 6.8 as far as I can tell, at least not without logging out (which closes all your apps) and logging back in.

6.8 introduced a live migration feature that is meant to make the system tolerant to eGPUs being unplugged, but it doesn't expose a setting to trigger it.

So what my plugin does is expose this setting and automating the migration based on what monitors are in use.

Hope it can be useful for someone else!

I want to switch to KDE plasma (I'm currently using GNOME) but I really like GNOME's ecosystem (and don't like KDE's one). So is there a way to install pure KDE plasma DE without all it's apps like Dolphin or KDE-connect

ScreenGuard a software for Digital wellbeing natively on Linux, was my personal project which i uploaded to share with the community. Ever since , thanks to constant support and request by although a camparitively tiny but rreally enthusiatic group of ppl , I have been able to provide constant support and improvements to the application and the once raw unpolished system in starting to look...less unpolished. There are still multiple things scrambled which need to be fixed however this major pre release is most possile the final testing phase before v0.1.1 so please do try it out and report and bugs if found.

Major Fixes and Improvements:

Native C Helpers — trasitioning toward a C-Based Core daemon bit by bit

• screenguard-notify (C): Desktop notification delivery no longer runs inside the Dart runtime. A tiny native helper talks to D-Bus directly, so alerts work identically on systemd and non-systemd systems (OpenRC, runit, …) where the old path could misbehave.
• screenguard-killer (C): Process termination offloaded from Dart as well — an escalating, data-safe close chain: polite window close request → SIGTERM → full process-tree SIGKILL → Proton-native wineserver -k → guarded pattern-kill. Another step toward making the daemon core C-based.

Both helpers ship in every package (.rpm, .deb, tarball) and are wired into install, uninstall, and build-tooling.

Full Database Control (Settings → Data)

• New Data tab in Settings: live storage stats, per-day deletion chips, date-range delete, and a full wipe behind a double confirmation. Settings and limits are always preserved — only usage history is touched.
• Orphaned sessions from unclean stops (logout, power loss) are now closed on next start instead of silently inflating Past-30-days stats.

Focus Enforcement, Data-Safety First

• Strict auto-close is now opt-in. The default never destroys unsaved work: a violating app is minimized and shown a persistent warning screen.
• The warning screen offers +1 minute save grace, +15 minutes, edit limit, and close — with the screen re-appearing every 5 seconds until you decide, and re-warninng immediately when a grace window expires.
• Turning on Strict auto-close (Settings) restores the legacy instant close+kill for those who want hard enforcement — your choice, your data.

Steam & Proton Games: First-Class Citizens

• Steam games no longer show up as mystery IDs (steam_app_2730970) — real names resolve from your Steam library manifests, with per-game icons rendered from the active icon theme.
• Their usage is fully tracked and limit/focus rules now apply to them; the escalating close chain (above) is what actually makes Close work on Proton games that shrug off normal signals.
• Fullscreen games now leave fullscreen before minimize (they silently ignore minimize requests otherwise), and the GNOME extension reports the real minimized state.

UI & Cosmetic

• Settings reorganized into a clean sidebar layout with five sections: General, Limits & Pomodoro, Diagnostics, Updates, and Data.
• Crash reporting moves into the new Diagnostics tab next to daemon status and autostart, with its badge on the tab itself.
• The Focus screen's app picker can switch to a GNOME app-grid style layout — icon over name, check-badge selection — via the Grid layout toggle.

Fixes & Optimizations

• Dead-code removal across the daemon (verified zero callers before each removal) plus notification-path optimization for non-systemd systems.
• Warning screens for both focus mode and daily limits rebuilt with consistent behavior and honest reporting ("was closed" vs "could not close").

Summing Up:

ScreenGuard still has a very long way to go with my aim being:

proper category wise classification of apps and category usage stats by v0.1.5

support for 3 other desktop environments i.e. KDE, Hyprland and Mint on wayland with improved optimization for non systemd systems (like gentoo users) by v 2.0 (also more fraction of the daemon to be translated to native C)

however all of this will definitely take a lot of time primarily discovering and learning how things work out first, thus if you do like the project , then u can give me a hand by contributing to things i am currently unknown to such has other Desktop environments other than GNOME or with C programming

Most importantly, my personel project that begun "Late Nights in The Middle of June" has indeed come a long way.

Link to the pre release: https://github.com/adityakrishnan005-a11y/ScreenGuard/releases/tag/v0.1.1-beta.6

DISCLAIMER: This fix worked for me; it might not work for you. Try at your own risk. I won't be responsible if your computer stops working.

Symptoms: After installing Plasma 6.8 and rebooting, your login screen switches back to SDDM instead of the regular KDE Plasma login screen.

Possible fix: I found that the plasmalogin.service was disabled and not running, while the sddm.service was enabled and running. I stopped and disabled the sddm.service via systemctl:

systemctl stop sddm.service
systemctl disable sddm.service

I then enabled the plasmalogin.service:
systemctl enable plasmalogin.service

Note: After starting plasmalogin.service, my computer locked and then did not unlock, despite entering my password. I rebooted and all was well. You might want to just reboot instead, to start plasmalogin.service that way.

(Optional) start plasmalogin.service:
systemctl start plasmalogin.service

Hopefully that made some sense. And more hopefully, your login screen didn't change when you installed Plasma 6.8. :)

"FreeDawn" is my new sound theme for Linux/KDE. It's available now on the KDE store

https://www.opendesktop.org/p/2379312/

This took me a few months since I made everything from scratch using synthesizers, I put quite a bit of effort in it so I hope someone out there likes it.

The default sound theme in KDE is already pretty great, but I did notice it can be a bit loud at times so I tried to tone things down.

It has a very "vanilla" sound style, I tried to compose sounds that convey the meaning of the action as best as I could.

It's "Free Under CC0" so re-use it as you like for whatever!

Disclaimer: this program was written with AI agents.

https://github.com/YaBulochka/appvol

I made this because I needed to control the volume of individual apps from the keyboard. It seemed like a pretty good idea, so here it is: appvol!

I used to get by with a hacky bash script bound to a hotkey that adjusted Spotify, but it had its problems and couldn't be scaled to more programs.

Plasma's volume applet and pavucontrol do per-app volume too, but with the mouse. appvol is for the keyboard.

What it does

- Change the volume of an app straight from the keyboard, without losing focus.

- Control the volume of whichever window you are currently focused on.

- Profiles: a profile controls a group of chosen apps, or ALL apps except the ones you exclude.

- Auto mode: the keys cycle through the focused window and every app that is currently playing audio.

- Native integration with Plasma Shortcuts and the Plasma OSD, plus a Qt GUI for profiles and settings.

Where it's useful for me

You’re sitting there playing, really getting into the vibe, and you just want to crank

the music volume way up—no need to Alt-Tab or jump over to a second monitor;

you just hit a hotkey, and—BOOM—it’s louder, or you can turn it back down. It’s fantastic.

In games while I'm in a voice chat: with two key presses I can make the game

louder or mute Discord completely, and then unmute it the same way. Or say

you're in a really tense clutch in CS2: one hotkey mutes EVERYTHING except CS2.

Packages

The program is split into two packages:

1. `appvol`: the CLI and the daemon
2. `appvol-gui`: the interface for profiles and other settings

Available for Arch (`.pkg.tar.zst`), Debian-based (`.deb`) and Fedora-based (`.rpm`), plus an install script for any other distribution (as long as its dependencies are met).

Status and limits

- Tested on Arch, KDE Plasma 6.7/6.8 (Wayland) only. Plasma 5 is not supported.

- KDE only for now. I may port it to other desktops in the future.

- Bug reports from other setups (distro, Plasma version, `appvol list` output) are very welcome, and so is any feedback.

I hope someone finds it useful :)

With the 6.8 release and this bug occurring on my end too, I researched how to change from SDDM to Plasma Login Manager.

From the Arch Wiki, I figured it would suffice disabling the SDDM service and enabling the Plasma Login Manager service, which did the track for the most part.

The problem I'm now experiencing is that fprintd doesn't seem to work with it and I can't change the background or anything using System Settings. I may have misconfigured some things, hence my question.

How can I fix this? Where should I look? What might need editing?

They happen once I type anything anywhere, once my cursors disappears, for example when watching a video on MPV, they happen in plasma login as well, they stop once I move the mouse, but once it disappears they return back, so what is that exactly?

Check out that radial launcher App called KARYON, that I made to improve my workflow. For a clean Desktop without Task- or Traybar, including media controls and gestures. NO touchpad support (for now). It simply works by Pressing and releasing the Right Mouse Button.

Please check it out and leave some feedback, that would be very much appreciated. Avaliable as simple AppImage. https://github.com/eiseneuter/karyon/releases

Anyway, you probably want to check if your /var/lib/systemd/coredump contains dozens, if not hundreds of crash dumps. If it's happening, see the link for a temporary fix.

In a previous version of Dolphin all windows/tabs were saved in .config/session as separate files that would then reopen when KDE launches. However now it seems that only the most recent window is saved in the file dolphin_dolphin_dolphin.

Is this by design that only a single window may be saved as a part of the session? Is there a way to restore the previous functionality? Or is this something already addressed by a newer version of Dolphin than what is in SteamOS? (25.04.3 as of this writing)

I updated to Plasma 6.8 and my notifications went from nicely being on my 2nd monitor , to being very rudely on my main monitor. I can't find any setting to change it back , only change the position of the notification on the main monitor , which is unacceptable for me. How do I fix this ?