This week in KDE: Plasma 6.1 cleanups

Automation & Systematization, This Week in KDE 4 Minutes

Plasma 6.1 has been released to good reviews! We’ve spent the week fixing issues reported so far, as always. So far we’re in good shape here, with almost all the big issues fixed already. We’re still tracking a few more, such as cases where triple buffering introduced stuttering, or random QML widgets and System Settings pages failing to launch until Qt’s QML cache folder is cleared (if you do this, please save it first and attach it to the bug report).

So this time, lets start with the bug fixes:

Bug Fixes

Moving the pointer right after the screen locks to make it unlock immediately no longer just breaks it entirely instead. In addition, made the screen locker more robust against failure in a few more cases (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.1. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Re-fixed the bug of desktop files dragged to another screen disappearing until Plasma was restarted. This so fixed a case where Plasma could crash when dragging files from the desktop to some folders in Dolphin (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1.1. Link 1 and link 2)

In Plasma’s new zoomed-out Edit Mode, moving non-center-aligned panels to a different screen edge once again works rather than crashing Plasma (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

KWin’s Cube effect can once again be opened reliably (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

KWin’s Zoom effect and ICC color profiles now get along better (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

KWin’s Shake Cursor effect now works as expected with every global animation speed, including animations entirely disabled (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

Fixed a recent visual regression KWin’s Glide effect (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

Widgets on the Plasma desktop that are dragged while in the new zoomed-out Edit Mode are now connected to the pointer as expected (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

In Discover, the “still looking” busy indicator is no longer visually broken for the first search you make after launching the app (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

Fixed that weird blur glitch when a floating panel de-floats (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 6.3.1. Link)

System Settings’ Audio Volume page no longer causes System Settings to crash when you open it for a second time(David Redondo, Qt 6.7.2. Link)

When you drag pinned Task Manager icons to re-arrange them, other icons no longer come along for the ride and ruin everything (Niccolò Venerandi, Qt 6.7.2. Link)

Other bug information of note:

UI Improvements

You can now resize the sidebar and the playlist bar in Elisa to suit your preferences. This is enabled by the recent work to get better a resizable split view control, so expect more of these soon! (Jack Hill, Elisa 24.08.0. Link)

Removed Filelight’s back and forward buttons because they were confusing when paired with the “go up” action (Han Young, Filelight 24.08.0. Link)

A number of countries that use Metric units with the US Letter paper size (e.g. Canada) now get the correct paper size set in System Settings’ Region & Language Page (Han Young, Plasma 6.1.1. Link)

By default, Breeze-themed windows can now be dragged only from their logical and visually distinct header areas, rather than every empty area. This is particularly helpful for control-heavy apps with with lots of draggable UI elements, such as Kdenlive. You can of course change this back if you’d like (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

In Discover, Flatpak runtimes on the Updates page are now shown in a separate “Application Support” category to clarify their purpose (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Plasma’s Weather widget now tries to guide you away from weather stations provided by wetter.com, which doesn’t even include current temperature data! These weather stations will now only be shown as a fallback if no other better weather stations are available (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Plasma’s Bluetooth widget no longer shows devices you’ve blocked (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

In System Monitor, you can now hide a column from the context menu you’ll see when right-clicking on its header (James Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Reverted a change made a few months ago to force single-click on Folder View popups in list mode. These are file views and not menus — despite any superficial similarity — so we now treat them like file views and respect your click preference (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

System Settings’ Quick Settings pages is now visible in the sidebar rather than the header, matching other KDE apps (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The Get New [thing] dialogs now use a more compact view style by default, improving information density (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.4. Link)

Automation & Systematization

Added some GUI tests for various functionality in KWrite (Antoine, Herlicq link)

Added an autotest to verify screen arrangements after XWayland scales change (Xaver Hugl, link)

Added an autotest to verify that power profiles work as expected (Fushan Wen, link)

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.

How You Can Help

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and labor have helped to bring it there! But as we grow, it’s going to be equally important that this stream of labor be made sustainable, which primarily means paying for it. Right now the vast majority of KDE runs on labor not paid for by KDE e.V. (the nonprofit foundation behind KDE, of which I am a board member), and that’s a problem. We’ve taken steps to change this with paid technical contractors — but those steps are small due to growing but still limited financial resources. If you’d like to help change that, consider donating today!

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

Published by Nate

Published

26 thoughts on “This week in KDE: Plasma 6.1 cleanups”

  2. I’m very thankful for the whole KDE team and community. 6.1 is already in a great state, can’t even wait for 6.2! The UI, its feature, the whole picture stitches continuously better together.

    TBH Plasma 6.1+ is just fun to use. 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

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  3. All the 6.x.0 releases feels like a beta version, the cause is, I believe – lack of beta testers. If you could make an agreement, that Fedora and other rolling distros could offer to opt-in installing the betas, then there would some more testers engaged, myself included.

    Neon Unstable is really buggy one (I have it installed on an old notebook), for now installed apps are just gone somewhere (Telegram, Thunderbird), seems I have to reinstall Neon, but anyway the notebook is very slow and I cannot use it for work.

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    3. It’s a good point. Plasma is so flexible that there is just no way for devs and current beta testers to test everything, nor for every combination of settings to be autotested.

      I’ve been playing with the idea in my own head recently to create a public release candidate version and ask the Arch folks to ship it to everyone. The experience wouldn’t actually change for Arch users (they’d get the same software that would ordinarily show up in the x.0.0 release) but everyone else would get a final x.0.0 release a week or two later that was substantially more polished.

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    4. For me the most annoying bug in 6.1.0 is this bug with taskbar.

      If I was able to beta test it, I would definitely see it and fill a bug before release.

      https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=488733
      [plasmashell] [Bug 488733] Icons-and-Text Task Manager does not show window titles on a vertical panel

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  5. 6.1 is amazing!!! Thanks to all in KDE!!!

    As soon as we get a release and we start reading about the next one is always that feeling of “can’t wait for the next version!!! That will be awesome”

    what a torture ahahah!

    there is one thing that stinks, however, that Get New Stuff bug where we can’t update our “stuff”!

    Man, Having to remove, reinstall and re-configure everything on each “stuff” update really makes me thinking “McDonalds” about it!

    it really looks bad and it does since 6.0 release!

    If you can, give it some love, please 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

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  6. Tried to do a switch from Windows 11 to KDE Neon, and was very surprised how well a lot worked, a lot of things better than Windows 11! Great job!

    While a lot was great, the critical issues were (that possibly prevents me from switching):

    1. “baloo_file_extractor” consuming half of the battery time! This needs to be fixed or turned off by default, since it takes the windows user back to to the Windows Vista era. This is critical. My 8 hours laptop in Win 11 gets 2 hours with KDE!
    2. Screen sharing does not work with Microsoft Teams in Wayland. This is critical.
    3. Battery life seems to be roughly half compared to Windows 11 even with “File indexer” turned off, which is weird since KDE Neon have far fewer processes running.
    4. Cannot figure out how to install NVIDIA graphic drivers
    5. No pinch zoom with touchpad (however works on the touchscreen flawlessly)

    And of course that MS Office doesn’t work. But working on figuring out how to get it work and maybe then post it here.

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    1. Battery life seems to be roughly half compared to Windows 11

      I had the same issue with a laptop I got couple of years ago which came with windows and gave roughly same battery life in plasma (iirc it was debian). I figured out it was due to nvidia driver (propitiatory) that nvidia card was always on even if the intel one was in use. I used some kernel commandline to put it in D3Cold by default and battery life doubled.

      I recommend you to install nvidia driver, place nvidia.NVreg_DynamicPowerManagement=0x02 in kernel param, and use the intel/amd inbuilt graphics card when not using graphics heavy tasks.

      Maybe give a try to fedora kde sometime. I’ve used that in few of my devices and so far it has been better than neon in few aspects, one being battery life.

      Liked by 1 person

  7. In Discover, Flatpak runtimes on the Updates page are now shown in a separate “Application Support” category to clarify their purpose

    Why not clarify the purpose even more and call the category “Flatpak runtimes”? Could rename “Applications” to “Flatpak applications” too while you’re at it. The present UI seems to want to protect the user from ever learning the distinction between the distro package manager and flatpak, but as a result it becomes confusing to users who do know the distinction, and not learning it isn’t a realistic hope anyway.

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    1. My guess is that “runtime” is a very technical term and might also not lend itself for easy translation.

      Having applications grouped by source would result potentially result in a lot of duplicated entries if one is available from multiple sources.

      For example I just looked for VLC and here on KDE Neon it is available from the package repo, Flathub and Snap.

      Instead of appearing as three entries it appears as one just indicates that it has alternative sources, with the default being the distro repo.

      At least from my point of view this is a much more sensible choice than there being three VLCs.

      A viable alternative could be to have different “store frontends”, one of each source, similar to the distinction between Google Play and F-Driod.

      However, personally I prefer the integrated solution

      Like

  8. By default, Breeze-themed windows can now be dragged only from their logical and visually distinct header areas, rather than every empty area. This is particularly helpful for control-heavy apps with with lots of draggable UI elements, such as Kdenlive. You can of course change this back if you’d lik

    I’m very glad this can be changed back, as this is something I thought was a highlight of Plasma’s flexibility! Will this be a default changed for all users, or will existing installations remain unaffected?

    The default changes brought in by Plasma 6.1.0 have been frustrating as a long-time user of KDE (started with KDE neon in early 2017), but at least for all the ones I dislike, Plasma still allows you to turn them back to the old behaviour. Stability has been great though, so perhaps it is a testament to the quality of the Desktop Environment that all I take issue with are changes to defaults which can be changed.

    I appreciate that it is difficult but I wonder if there is a better way to inform users of changed defaults? Maybe a section on the KDE announcements page could help? I don’t necessarily dislike that a certain setting was added, but can be frustrating when something is enabled and you’re not sure if you can turn it off.

    I don’t think this is going to be a quick-fix and it won’t cover users who don’t read any announcements, just wondering if maybe there could be anything done to make awareness of changes defaults. Maybe there already is and I’m just out of the loop! ;D

    I still appreciate all of the KDE devs’ work and still support the vision of Plasma, so no disrespect intended towards anyone. Maybe the people like me that don’t like the newer defaults in Plasma 6.1 are so much in the minority that it isn’t worth it.

    Thanks for your coverage (and extensive bug triaging!) as always.

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  10. Kalculator is still broken completely. You can’t do continous calculations as in all other calculators in the world. For example:

    2+2=4 then try to add 1 to it (so: 2+2=4+1). You would expect that 4+1 is 5., but no, it shows 1… because the result of the calculation is not taken into another one, although it is displayed on the screen. Not so long ago it was even worse, because it showed error, but I guess it was half-fixed…

    This bug was in Plasma 6.0 and still exists on 6.1.

    I had to install Gnome Calculator, which works as expected.

    However, as to Plasma 6.1 update in general, all works fine. I could complain about some visual inconsitencies like rounded corners be once on the upper part of the window, once below, but it’s just small detail that will be probably improved with time.

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  11. Ah, forgot to mention, that the new feature of changing keyboard’s light color works on my laptop fine :D. I guess it’s no wonder, since it’s from TUXEDO.

    I didn’t notice it at first, or actually, I noticed that the keyboard looks a bit different now, till I realized later it took the color of the wallpaper accent.

    Liked by 1 person

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  12. So far, having disturbing experience with Plasma 6.1 over Plasma 5 😦

    KRDP does not work, just fails silently after a client connects. Screen locking is always blocked by something, and I a way to override this.

    Regressions in Dolphin working with folders containing half a million of files. This list goes on, details in bugzilla.

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    1. KRDP does not work, just fails silently after a client connects.

      I thought thsat’s an issue on my installation only. Thanks! Can you privide the bug id?

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  13. Glad to see the refinements are coming. I’ve just set up a recurring donation to KDE E.V.

    Also, I thought that the RDP KCM would just automatically appear in System Settings, but it needs to be specifically installed with the krdp package, at least in Neon.

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    1. Yes, this was a Neon omission. I pinged the devs and they fixed it a few days ago.

      I hate to say it, but I probably wouldn’t recommend using Neon in a production environment at this point. It’s not in an amazing state. There are various movements internally to do something about this situation, but nothing has borne enough fruit yet to make it public.

      Thanks for the donation! That definitely does help. 🙂

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