“This Week in Plasma” brings the news that System Settings’ pages become “smart” and can mark themselves as “not relevant” if, for example, you do not have the hardware to use them. They can also export actions to the sidebar, allowing you to quickly toggle devices on and off. And Discover can now be opened directly from Install buttons on FlatHub.
Read about this, and much more in Nate’s blog post:
https://blogs.kde.org/2025/08/09/this-week-in-plasma-quick-toggles-in-system-settings/
I’m happy that KDE defines “smart” as “hey user, you probably don’t need this.”
As opposed to Apple’s “the system is going to predict things to make your life easier, and will be wrong much of the time.”
I Love being able to see “not relevant” settings because it helps tremendously with debugging and/or helping others navigate through settings that i might not have on my own pc. Having bluetooth settings marked at “not relevant” is much more helpful than the settings just completely missing if you have issues with the hardware being detected. Otherwise you might just think that you are looking at the wrong place sending you on a wild goose chase with no end.
Though sometimes it’s nice to see options even if not available. For example I didn’t know KDE offered GUI to control Bluetooth adapters. My internal one in laptop is glitched and in GNOME you don’t know which one will be used if you add external USB BT dongle. Meanwhile KDE offers simple toggle to turn off adapter of choice via GUI and thus only allowing USB BT to operate. For others like GNOME I had to fiddle with weird terminal commands to do it and edit config file, in KDE it was a simple toggle button that I could see. Just example.
