KDE Plasma 6.4 released

I find KDE a generally pleasing and nice environment to work in and the level of polish in the latest releases is appreciable. My pain points aren't actually with plasma itself, but with some of its (mostly Qt, but not only) underpinnings. Particularly, there are two items that I find particularly troublesome:

(i) the print dialog and the interaction with the CUPS printing system is rather poor. The dialog does not let you specify things that are actually extra basic, to the point that you would take them for granted, such as the choice between color and monochrome printing. For these, you need to access the detailed printer properties pane (which is often messy and full of low-level items). Even with that, specifying color/monochrome will often not work anyway since these printer options get overridden by the default cups job options. Often, the selection only works if you ask the job to be rasterized before being sent to the printer.

(ii) there is no usable on screen keyboard for tablets and convertibles. Yes, there is maliit, but that does not offer a "terminal" layout, only a basic alphanumeric one. Missing all the control keys, you can't really do any work on that. Furthermore, when the keyboard opens, the windows get resized to only occupy the part of the screen used by the keyboard, but their original size is not remembered, so when you close the keyboard the windows do not get resized back to their original size, which makes you basically loose half of your screen even when you don't use the keyboard (or alternatively requires a continuous manual window resize exercise).

Now for (ii), I hope that the coming of the Framework 12 that is a convertible, will create more occasions for developers to work on features for this type of machines.