The topic KDE Plasma 6.8 will finally fix the worst part of Spectacle is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
KDE does an amazing job getting newcomers fully kitted out with the essential apps. When you install Plasma, you also get excellent tools such as KDE Connect, which acts similarly to Microsoft’s Windows Your Phone but is open-source. Likewise, Plasma has its own screenshotting tool called Spectacle, which does the job…for the most part.
See, while Spectacle can capture windows and regions just fine, it’s a little lacking in the video recording department. It can record video, but audio is currently unavailable, so every recording you take is in dead silence. Fortunately, it won’t be too long until this quirk has been fixed, as Plasma 6.8 will finally allow you to record from your PC’s audio or your mic.
Over on the KDE blogs website, the community has published a new “This Week in Plasma” post. It’s a weekly digest where the community collects everything that happened over the past week and presents it as a handy preview of what we can expect from future versions of Plasma.
The spotlight feature, and something I’ve really wanted from Spectacle for a while:
Spectacle now gives you the option to record audio during screen recordings! It can grab audio from the microphone, audio that the system is outputting, or both.
This is really big, as audio recording was pretty much the only crucial feature that Spectacle was missing. The bad news is that it’s scheduled for KDE Plasma 6.8, which should release in October, so there’s still a bit of a wait left. Fortunately, Plasma 6.8 will also speed up Spectacle with the removal of a “fairly chunky” software library, and will also let system Monitor show you VRAM percentage use like it does with regular RAM. Good things come to those who wait.