Summary
- KDE Plasma 6.8 alerts you if a printer is unavailable and adds a ‘Resume Printer’ button.
- Other UI tweaks include cleaner Task Manager thumbnails and clearer account-name validation errors.
- Plasma 6.8 improves remote desktop performance and is due October 14.
Printers are already annoying enough to work with without your operating system making things worse. For a while now, KDE Plasma has had an annoying issue where attempting to print a document on an unavailable printer would cause it to fail silently. Fortunately, the next version of KDE Plasma, 6.8, will actually tell you when something goes wrong.
KDE Plasma 6.8 will actually tell you if a printer isn’t available
A lot more useful than just silently shrugging
Credit: KDE
Over on the KDE website, the community has compiled the newest edition of This Week in Plasma. If you’re a big fan of KDE Plasma and you’ve never heard of it, you owe it to yourself to subscribe to it. It gives cool insights into how future versions of KDE Plasma will look, including all the exciting additions to the next big version update.
While this week’s digest isn’t jam-packed with exciting updates, it does promise one handy fix for a very annoying problem. Right now, if you tell KDE Plasma to print on a printer that is unavailable, it will fail with no error message. Not only do you not get your document printed, but you’re not even sure if your printer registered your request.
With KDE Plasma 6.8, the desktop environment will actually tell you if it couldn’t send the print job over. You can see an example of the new notification above; it’s pretty clean, and I do like the addition of a “Resume Printer” button for easy activation.
KDE Plasma 6.8 will bring some additional UI tweaks to the table. For instance, Task Manager thumbnails will have nicer padding around the top labels, and if you try to create a user account with disallowed characters, KDE will actually tell you what’s wrong. Plus, if you use Plasma’s built-in remote desktop server on a less-than-ideal internet connection, you should notice improved performance with 6.8.
KDE Plasma 6.8 is scheduled to release on October 14th, so there’s still a bit of time until we get these handy tweaks. However, it’s always good to know that they’re actively being worked on, even if we don’t have them right now.
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