Summary

  • KDE Plasma adds system-wide push-to-talk in 6.7.0 — hold a key to unmute your mic across all apps.
  • Plasma 6.6.0 gets a UI process-priority menu to micromanage how apps run easily.
  • Brightness & Color widget gains a light/dark toggle now; a smooth cross-fade is planned.

You know, I didn't realise how useful a system-wide push-to-talk system would be until I learned that it was a thing. Even if the app you're using doesn't support push-to-talk, you can just enable it within the operating system and use it no matter what software you're on. In fact, I'm a little surprised Windows doesn't have such a feature already.

Well, there's good news: my favorite desktop environment, KDE Plasma, is getting a system-wide push-to-talk system that does just that. In fact, the KDE team is cooking up some really nice tweaks that I can't wait to see on my own PC in due time.

KDE Plasma is getting a UI-based process manager, a push-to-talk button, and more

Things are looking great for FOSS fans

Credit: KDE

Over on the KDE Blog, there's a brand new "This week in Plasma" post. If this is your first time here, the KDE community band together to give everyone a weekly update as to what's going on behind the scenes of the desktop environment, with some peeks into what to expect from future builds.

This week, the big spotlight feature is on a new tool coming in Plasma 6.6.0. This will add a graphical menu to the process priority screen, which makes it easier to micromanage how everything is running. You can see a picture of the UI in the image above.

Personally, my highlight is in the section for features scheduled for 6.7.0. There's a handy push-to-talk feature in the works that lets you enable and disable your microphone on the fly:

Added a global push-to-talk feature: if you set a push-to-talk key, all microphones will be muted until the specified key is held down. (Kai Uwe Broulik, Aleix Pol Gonzalez, and Shubham Arora, plasma-pa MR #394, kglobalaccel MR #41, and plasma-workspace MR #6126)

KDE Plasma 6.7.0 will also introduce a new toggle in the Brightness and Color widget that will let you flip between light and dark modes with the flick of a switch. Right now, the transition is pretty jarring, but the KDE team hopes to add "a nice cross-fade transition" to it at a future date.

Either way, there's a lot to look forward to in KDE's future. In fact, these constant updates and quality-of-life tweaks is a major reason as to why I can't go back to Windows after KDE spoiled me rotten.