News: 0001592019

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Plasma 6.6 Will Avoid Running Out Of RAM When Something Crashes In A Loop

([KDE] 14 Minutes Ago DrKonqi Going Wild)


KDE Plasma 6.6 continues seeing a lot of development activity while the Plasma 6.5 series is calming down after its first few point releases. Plasma 6.6 landed many more features and improvements this week.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly status update in This Week In Plasma. Some of the KDE Plasma highlights for this week include:

- The KDE Spectacle screenshot recording utility has gained optical character recognition (OCR) support. This allows turning words within images into selectable text. This OCR support for Spectacle makes use of the very powerful Tesseract engine. Other KDE apps are likely to adopt similar OCR functionality moving forward.

- Plasma 6.6 will present better looking portal-based permission dialogs with a number of enhancements coming.

- The GTK theme chooser now lets the user preview the dark theme version too.

- Plasma 6.6 is increasing the level of visual fidelity when using a fractional scale even more.

- Plasma 6.5.3 fixes a case where KWin could get blocked due to many heavy I/O operations.

- For Plasma 6.6, a process that is crashing in a loop can no longer make the system run out of memory and freeze by the crash tracer trying to debug all the crashes. The issue is that DrKonqi was launching once per crash and in turn firing up the GDB debugger for each crash, etc. With Plasma 6.6, one instance of DrKonqi will run across different crash instances. Plus other improvements to avoid going overboard on memory use when dealing with these crashes in a loop.

More details on these KDE Plasma changes for the week via [1]this blog post by KDE developer Nate Graham.



[1] https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/15/this-week-in-plasma-ocr-in-spectacle-and-many-ui-improvements/



By the middle 1880's, practically all the roads except those in
the South, were of the present standard gauge. The southern roads were
still five feet between rails.
It was decided to change the gauge of all southern roads to standard,
in one day. This remarkable piece of work was carried out on a Sunday in May
of 1886. For weeks beforehand, shops had been busy pressing wheels in on the
axles to the new and narrower gauge, to have a supply of rolling stock which
could run on the new track as soon as it was ready. Finally, on the day set,
great numbers of gangs of track layers went to work at dawn. Everywhere one
rail was loosened, moved in three and one-half inches, and spiked down in its
new position. By dark, trains from anywhere in the United States could operate
over the tracks in the South, and a free interchange of freight cars everywhere
was possible.
-- Robert Henry, "Trains", 1957