The KDE Plasma and usability teams recently converged on Valencia, Spain for a combined development sprint. The teams admired Valencia's medieval architecture and stayed up until midnight eating sumptuous Mediterranean food. But of course, the real purpose was work! The aim was not only to hack on Plasma and the U&P initiative, but to benefit from the cross-pollination opportunities provided by hosting both at the same time and place. The result was a huge amount of work on Plasma, KWin, Dolphin, Spectacle, and many other bits of KDE software! Present for the Plasma sprint were Kai Uwe Broulik, David Edmundson, Nicolas Fella, Eike Hein, Roman Gilg, Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Marco Martin, and Bhushan Shah. They had quite a busy agenda: In addition to the technical progress, the Plasma and usability teams converged to discuss a number of long-standing Plasma issues and figure out how we resolve them: Make it easier to test a custom-compiled version of Plasma. We implemented changes that allow you to integrate your custom-compiled Plasma into SDDM by running a single command, after which you can log into it normally. For more information, see this article. Make it more obvious and discoverable that Plasma is made of widgets, and how they're configured. We decided to create a new "global edit mode" that's triggerable from within System Settings, which is where new users generally expect everything to be configured. In this global edit mode, all widgets become visibly configurable, editable, removable, etc. We also want to make it easy to change the wallpaper when in this mode. With all of that done, we'll be able to remove the Desktop Toolbox as it currently exists. Unify the disparate scaling methods. We decided to visually connect the scale factor chooser with the "Force Fonts DPI" setting, since former actually affects the latter, but not the other way around. This should make it clear that the scaling slider is the primary way to scale the screen, the the "force fonts DPI" control is nothing more than a way to further tweak things. Make Plasma respect the systemwide scale factor on X11. We came up with a path forward and a plan for getting it done! Add power actions to the lock screen. We concluded that not only does this make sense, but it will be necessary for Plasma mobile anyway. In a multi-user environment, the user will need to enter an admin password to shut down or restart the machine when other users are also logged in. --- Over in the Usability & Productivity room, we had Méven Car, Albert Astals Cid, Noah Davis, Filip Fila, Nate Graham, and David Redondo. The agenda was similarly jam-packed, and included the following: In addition, we came to some conclusions for higher-level goals: We plan to pay for professional user research to generate new "personas" (target user groups that represent the people using our software), and use these personas as the basis for professional usability testing for Plasma, Dolphin, Gwenview, Okular, and other components of a basic desktop. We also discussed how we can add release notes data to our apps' AppStream data, so that it shows up in software center apps like Discover. The big blocker was getting the required translations added to the tarball, so we've started a dialogue with AppStream maintainer Matthias Klumpp regarding adding a new feature to pull translations from a remote location, which would support our workflow. The conversation is proceeding nicely so far. Finally, VDG member Noah Davis dug deep into Breeze to work on visual consistency improvements regarding selection highlights. Given his growing familiar with the code, he's well on his way toward becoming the next Breeze maintainer! All in all, it was a very productive week. KDE Plasma and apps are in a great place right now, and the teams' effort to further improve things will be making it into into future versions, so stay tuned!