This Week in Plasma: Audio Recording in Spectacle - KDE BlogsThis Week in Plasma: Audio Recording in Spectacle<br>Saturday, 11 July 2026<br> | <br>Nate Graham and John Veness<br>#This Week in Plasma
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!<br>This week was busy! We’ve got some great new features to share, improved theming compatibility, UI improvements, bug fixes… and lots more! This is one of those weeks with a bit of something for everyone — even people who are picky about software dependencies. Take a look:<br>Notable new features<br>Plasma 6.8<br>Spectacle now gives you the option to record audio during screen recordings! It can grab audio from the microphone, audio that the system is outputting, or both. (Khudoberdi Abdujalilov, KDE Bugzilla #474798)<br>System Monitor can now measure VRAM usage as a percentage of the total, just like it can for regular RAM. (Beck Thompson, ksystemstats MR #135)<br>The 13-month Ethiopian calendar joins the growing ranks of supported alternate calendars! (Eyobed Awel, kdeplasma-addons MR #1079)<br>Notable UI improvements<br>Plasma 6.6.6<br>Improved the responsiveness of the brightness slider in the Brightness & Color widget. (Marco Martin, powerdevil MR #650)<br>Plasma 6.7.3<br>The Vietnamese lunar calendar now displays its text in Vietnamese even if your system language is set to something else, which is more consistent with other alternate calendars. (Trần Nam Tuấn, KDE Bugzilla #521787)<br>The feature to show alternative characters when you press and hold a key on the keyboard now triggers after 600 milliseconds of holding, rather than 200. This should make it much harder to accidentally activate. (Kristen McWilliam, plasma-keyboard MR #157)<br>You can now interact with the Overview and Custom Tiling overlays using a drawing tablet stylus in a Wayland session. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #468396 and KDE Bugzilla #522677)<br>Plasma 6.8<br>Comboboxes in Plasma now use the active Plasma theme to style their popups, rather than using a hardcoded Breeze-style appearance. And their menu highlights no longer animate in and out, either, which matches the appearance everywhere else. (Filip Fila, libplasma MR #1547 and libplasma MR #1550)<br>System Settings’ Remote Desktop page no longer looks somewhere between “very awkward” and “broken” with a small and narrow window size, like on a phone. (Nick Haghiri, krdp MR #208)<br>System Settings’ “Report a Bug in the Current Page” feature now works for pages that didn’t come from KDE but still list a bug reporting URL. (Antti Savolainen, systemsettings MR #412)<br>Auto-login now works in Plasma Login Manager on operating systems with older versions of systemd, like KDE neon. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #522006)<br>Brightness on external monitors now changes more quickly after you adjust the brightness slider in the Brightness & Color widget. (Kylie CT, KDE Bugzilla #498913)<br>Frameworks 6.29<br>When using the default qqc2-desktop-style system (as opposed to when testing the upcoming Union system), list and grid view highlights in QML-based KDE software now respect the visual styling of the active app style, rather than having a hardcoded Breeze-style appearance. In addition, password fields no longer change in height for certain fonts when you type the first character into them. (Evgeniy Harchenko, qqc2-desktop-style MR #521 and qqc2-desktop-style MR #524)<br>The Breeze icon theme now includes an icon for Android app bundle files. (Tobias Zwick, KDE Bugzilla #508430)<br>The large fancy Kirigami tab bars seen in QML-based KDE software now switch the active tab when you scroll over them or press one of the standard tab-switching keyboard shortcuts — just like tab bars in QtWidgets-based apps do. (Tobias Ozór, kirigami MR #2123)<br>Notable bug fixes<br>Plasma 6.6.6<br>The Choose Application window no longer percent-encodes some characters in filenames, which looked pretty ugly. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #521748)<br>The Media Frame widget no longer displays every other image in a somewhat sharpened and crunchy manner. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #521534)<br>Plasma 6.7.3<br>Fixed a recent regression that broke closing windows in the Overview overlay by middle-clicking them. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #522015)<br>Fixed a few remaining minor layout regressions in the Color Picker widget, so now it should always have the same size as it did in Plasma 6.6. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #522377)<br>Fixed a recent regression in an X11 session that made icons of all running Flatpak apps appear unnecessarily in the System Tray. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #522864)<br>Plasma no longer crashes if you disable the Calendar Events plugin in one Digital Clock widget when there are more than one of them with that plugin enabled. (Shouvik Kar, KDE Bugzilla #520465)<br>When the system is configured to automatically switch global themes at certain times of day, this switchover now takes place as expected even if the computer happened to be turned off when the transition would have taken place. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #511740)<br>Plasma...