Upon checking out various sub-Reddits about what KDE apps people love the most, I was not surprised to see that Spectacle was consistently on most people's lists.

Spectacle is a free and open-source utility for the KDE Plasma desktop and, at first glance, it might not seem all that special. However, the more time you spend with Spectacle, the more you eventually see that it's a very powerful screenshot app (especially for an app that comes by default on an OS).

What makes Spectacle so special? A simple answer would be that it perfectly caters to most day-to-day users' needs. The app allows users to capture images of their screens and it has four appropriately named modes: Capture Entire Desktop, Capture Current Monitor, Capture Active Windows, and Capture Rectangular Region.

The app works on Wayland, as well as in non-KDE X11 desktop environments, and it's also capable of both taking screenshots and recording video desktop activities.

An aspect that makes Spectacle such a beloved KDE app is that it has a lot of functionality. Just comparing it with most default screenshot utilities would be somewhat of a joke.

The app provides a quick way to copy screenshots to the clipboard, to export them to a wide range of apps (and to a wide range of formats as well), to print them, as well as to annotate them.

Speaking of supported formats, the list is impressive. Just to name a few, the app supports AVIF, BMP, ICNS, ICO, JFIF, JPG, JPEG, TIFF, WEBP, AND XBM.

Add all these features to the app's extensive Settings section, and what you get is a perfect little screenshot/screen recording utility for what is one of the most customizable and user-friendly desktop environments.