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In another of their regular update blog posts, KDE's Nate Graham has highlighted some recent new KDE Plasma features coming soon to the desktop.

With the latest blog post the first noted item might have a lot of uses! As Ark, the KDE file compression/decompression utility, can now open and un-archive self-extracting .exe archive files. There's a lot of installers out there for games, mods and plenty more that use this and so just being able to extract them simply on KDE Plasma with Ark sounds really useful. This will come with Ark version 24.05.

Some more work is going into tweaking the Plasma UI too including showing you shortcuts over menu items, like middle click for opening a file in the first entry inside the "Open With" menu. That simple but useful change is coming with Dolphin 24.05.

They've also made the floating panel’s float/de-float animation smoother when using a scale factor, in Plasma's global Edit Mode you can now click anywhere on a panel to show that panel’s own configuration dialog, entries in the System Settings Autostart page are now sorted alphabetically and more.

Lots of bug fixes coming too as the clean-up continues from the main Plasma 6 release. Like a fix to relax KWin's requirement on Wayland that XWayland windows can only put content on the clipboard when they have keyboard focus, as this was not a requirement on X11 and enforcing it was breaking some XWayland-using apps.

Have you made the jump to Plasma 6 yet? Or are you waiting for a bit for bug fixes to roll in?

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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11 comments
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whizse Mar 26
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GNOME users had this for ages, but we took the feature for granted and lost the opportunity to brag about it. Well played KDE, well played!

As for Plasma 6. I'm not a .0 kind of person .1 possibly .1.1 more likely.
shimmy Mar 26
QuoteHave you made the jump to Plasma 6 yet? Or are you waiting for a bit for bug fixes to roll in?

When Fedora 40 is out... I'll consider it. I've just updated to 39, so I'm in no rush. Though it's tempting, of course.

My XPS laptop runs F40 with 6.0.2, but I barely use it, so in general it works great!
Bumadar Mar 26
Quoting: whizseGNOME users had this for ages, but we took the feature for granted and lost the opportunity to brag about it. Well played KDE, well played!

As for Plasma 6. I'm not a .0 kind of person .1 possibly .1.1 more likely.

Am running tumbleweed, when it was released there it was 6.0.1 (if I remember correct)
I found the whole experience very pleasing for something as huge as this.
- zypper dup from tty
- wayland selected after reboot
- got a 30sec hang when desktop loaded, was a kde connect issue, fixed in 6.0.2 a few days later
- had some issue with kwallet6 and proton bridge, solved that with startup script to load kwallet6, wait few sec then photon bridge
- sometimes I do notice f12 does not always bring up yakuake, can't pinpoint it yet, but 2nd press works

And that basically was it, am enjoying it a lot and am mighty impressed with how smooth something as big like this went.


Last edited by Bumadar on 26 March 2024 at 7:25 pm UTC
slaapliedje Mar 26
Wait... did Ark not support .exe files before? Could have sworn I've opened these before with Ark. Though I switch back and forth between Gnome/KDE a lot (mainly due to drag/drop being broken in File-roller for way too long now). Doesn't Ark/File-roller both just use the same libunar (I think that's the one) that supports all the things for unarchiving?
whizse Mar 26
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Quoting: BumadarAnd that basically was it, am enjoying it a lot and am mighty impressed with how smooth something as big like this went.
That's good to hear! People with problems tend to be a lot more vocal so success stories can easily be lost in the noise.
benstor214 Mar 26
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Quoting: whizsePeople with problems tend to be a lot more vocal so success stories can easily be lost in the noise.
I had an issue before where sddm would not load on startup and I needed to open another tty to systemctl restart sddm or do a hard reset of my machine. This issue just went away with Plasma 6. Also, for some reason, booting my EFISTUB would not work without base and udev. After the update to Plasma 6 I can now boot without these and only with systemd.
My setup runs more stable than ever before! I wish there were a way to relay this to the KDE devs...

edit: The systemd boot is probably more related to an update of mkinitcpio rolled out by the arch repository.


Last edited by benstor214 on 26 March 2024 at 10:14 pm UTC
redneckdrow Mar 26
Self extracting archives?

I still have nightmares about those things! 15–20 years ago, they were a huge deployment method for all manner of worms and viruses!

I caught one in high school when I noticed one of our teacher's computers behaving oddly.

My high school had a contract with McAfee, and I remember having to explain along with both computer skills teachers, why said 'antivirus' hadn't caught a teacher's infected e-mail attachment before it had reached the school's network and why John McAfee's product was absolute snake oil! Thankfully, no one else opened the attachment!

From a bootable USB drive I always kept on me, I ran Malwarebytes and several other programs, and found 122 actual bugaboos and only 2 false positives on the initially infected machine. Apparently, it was pandelirium in the computer lab for the next couple hours!

Anyone who uses a self-extracting executable/zip of any kind these days should be shot, hanged, and shot again!
I was wondering if there were any security implications. (I don't run KDE so it's of no particular concern to me either way, just curious.)
tuubi Mar 27
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Quoting: PhiladelphusI was wondering if there were any security implications. (I don't run KDE so it's of no particular concern to me either way, just curious.)
Not really. A self-extracting archive is simply an archive bundled together with an executable, and Ark can now read and extract the contents of these archives as well, ignoring the executable part. So nothing gets executed. Other archive managers and command line tools have had this ability for years. I'm surprised that Ark did not.
pete910 Mar 27
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Have to ask why you would want to


"I spit at thee exe!!!!"
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