KDE Plasma 6.9 will finally give us Wayland picture-in-picture mode by default

Summary

• Plasma 6.9 remembers open window sizes and positions per screen arrangement.

• Wayland picture-in-picture enabled; can permanently deny XWayland apps pointer/keyboard control.

• Hold Ctrl or Shift in Task Switcher to stop bouncing and select multiple items; many 6.8 bug fixes inbound.

With KDE Plasma 6.8 now out, people are finding new and exciting ways to break the desktop environment in two. As such, the maintainers have gone into a big bug-fixing spree to ensure 6.8 is as good as it can be. Fortunately, the team found some room to squeeze some handy new features into KDE Plasma 6.9, including getting Wayland's picture-in-picture mode working.

KDE Plasma 6.9 will add Wayland picture-in-picture mode

It can't come sooner, honestly

Over on KDE's This Week in Plasma, the team explores what's coming to the next major version, 6.9. The star of the show is Wayland picture-in-picture, which is apparently working as intended and will be enabled by default once 6.9 drops.

The community also figured out how to stop windows from getting scrambled when you disconnect monitors:

Window sizes and positions are now remembered on a per-screen-arrangement basis!

This means if you arrange your open windows across two screens, then disconnect one, then rearrange the windows to suit the now-single-screen arrangement… then when you reconnect the second screen, open windows will jump to the sizes and positions they last had on the two-screen arrangement. And when you disconnect a screen again, open windows will jump to the sizes and positions they had on the single-screen setup.

This only affects windows that are currently open, so if you close one, and then re-open it, it will still use the old behavior. However, the maintainers are figuring out a way to get that to happen for closed windows, too.

KDE Plasma 6.9 will come with a nice selection of other features, such as permanently denying XWayland-using apps from requesting control for the pointer and keyboard, Brave support for Plasma Browser, and holding down Ctrl or Shift in the Task Switcher will stop everything from bouncing around so you can properly pick multiple items. And, as mentioned before, there's a ton of bug fixes for 6.8 on the way.

KDE Plasma 6.8 has just been released, so 6.9 won't be for a while yet; however, it's already shaping up to be a good one.