This week in KDE: The best Plasma 5 version ever… again!

Automation & Systematization, This Week in KDE 4 Minutes

Plasma 5.27 LTS will be released in just a few days. And so far it’s on track to be the least-buggy version in memory! At the time of writing there are only three known regressions, down from the dozen or more we usually ship with. A focus on stability pays off!

As part of that effort, you might have heard we did a major push to fix multi-monitor issues for this release, and so far it looks to have worked: tons of people are reporting that their longstanding issues are fixed in the beta! But there are sure to be a few more. When you do encounter an issue, I’d encourage you to read this blog post by Marco Martin before submitting a bug report. In it, you’ll learn how best to submit a bug report for multi-monitor issues and what data to gather, so that it has the best chance of being actionable.

But that’s not all! We landed some great new features for Plasma 6 and made good progress on the 15-minute bugs, too!

New Features

Dolphin can now show you how many pages a document has in its additional metadata display (Serg Podtynnyi, Dolphin 23.04. Link)

KRunner can now convert between time zones. Now it’s easy to find out what any time in your local time zone will be anywhere else in the world! (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.0. Link):

KRunner with search text "5:00 PM in UTC" showing that the UTC time would be 12:00 AM the next day
KRunner with search text "5:00 PM in Malaysia" showing that the time in Malaysia would be 8:00 AM the next day

User Interface Improvements

When you delete a file in Dolphin, it now selects the next one automatically (Serg Podtynnyi, Dolphin 23.04. Link)

When you ask Elisa to open a Playlist file with invalid paths, it now skips them, shows you a message explaining what happened, and offers you the possibility to open the file you can edit it to fix the broken paths (Nikita Karpei, Elisa 23.04. Link):

Part of Elisa music player's main window showing inline error message that says, "Failed to load some tracks. Make sure they have not been removed or renamed" plus a button labeled "Edit Playlist File"

When Discover’s Flatpak backend is installed and in use, it should now be significantly faster when using version 0.16.0 of the AppStream library (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.1. Link)

System Settings’ Window Decorations page now uses the more modern frameless style, rather than a tabbed view (Joshua Goins, Plasma 6.0. Link):

System Settings main window showing Window Decorations page in a modern frameless style

KRunner will now find files that it previously wouldn’t because they didn’t fall into a common category (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.0. Link)

In System Settings’ Region & Language page, the warning that appears when you configure languages in an invalid way by placing any languages below American English in the priority list now displays it as well when you do that for British English or Australian English, which will generally produce a weird mix of languages in your apps (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0. Link)

When you set an opacity window rule, it now defaults to 100% opacity rather than 0% opacity, and if you manually lower it down to 25% or less, it will show a warning that this may make the window difficult to interact with (Ismael Asensio and Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Throughout KDE software, when trying to run a command-line program that doesn’t exist or can’t be found, you’ll now see an appropriate error message telling you this (Thenujan Sandramohan, Frameworks 5.103. Link)

Significant Bugfixes

(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)

Dolphin should now be significantly less likely to lag or hang while browsing manually mounted network shares. There’s still more to do, and you should still try to access network locations from their network URLs, but this should still help! (Andrew Gunnerson, Dolphin 23.04. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, Okular’s main window will now raise as expected when it’s already open and a document is opened from another app (Nicolas Fella, Okular 23.04. Link)

The Digital Clock Widget’s Month View is no longer sometimes empty (Someone awesome, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Performing system updates on some distros no longer sometimes resets your touchpad settings (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Fixed a source of hangs and lags in Plasma (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Apps with System Tray icons are no longer sometimes missing from the Tray when autostarted (David Redondo, Plasma 5.27. Link)

When hovering over a Task Manager icon to show the preview for that window or group of windows, moving the cursor diagonally to the preview in such a manner that it passes over another icon in the process no longer causes the preview to disappear before the cursor gets there. This also fixes a related issue where it was impossible to reach the preview for a window located in the bottom row of a multi-row Task Manager! (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27. Link 1 and link 2)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when using a GPU that doesn’t support atomic modesetting, the cursor will no longer disappear when it touches the bottom or right screen edge in WINE games (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.1. Link)

Dolphin can no longer hang while trying to display metadata and previews for .mobi files (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.104. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Added a new autotest for the Task manager to test the integrity of the data model (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Added a new UI test to make sure that the Plasma logout screen works properly (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.27.1. Link)

Added a tutorial for writing Kate plugins (Waqar Ahmed, Link)

Brought the documentation for System Settings’ Workspace Options page up to date (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.0. 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

Please test the Plasma 5.27 beta! Bug reports filed against the beta version (5.26.90) get looked at and prioritized. It really helps. And of course, if you’re a developer, fixing those bugs is massively impactful too. You might also want to check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover 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!

And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today!

Published by Nate

Published

25 thoughts on “This week in KDE: The best Plasma 5 version ever… again!”

  1. A ten-year-old bug and a 6 year old bug were squashed this week, very nice!

    “Dolphin should now be significantly less likely to lag or hang while browsing manually mounted network shares… (Andrew Gunnerson, Dolphin 23.04)” …. 👈THIS!!! 👈 I’ve been waiting a long time to hear this and after digging through the bug report I see that a brave developer is looking to make the I/O code be multi-threaded! So finally Dolphin will feel zippy, woohoo!

    Honestly cannot wait to experience all the hard work from the devs when 5.27 releases!

    Liked by 3 people

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  3. I can confirm happily that Plasma 5.27 (I am currently in the beta) is indeed one of the best versions ever, especially regarding multi-monitor!

    In the past I turned of kscreen on X11 so my layout never changed and my programs didn’t moved ever so slightly whenever a layout change was detected.

    Wayland was in some way’s better, but still not perfect and in the end I found a command (udevadm control –stop) that stopped device detection and I was able to let programs run and nothing would change.

    But now, with the 5.27 beta I can now safely turn on my receiver (and TV) and off without things getting weird. I can even turn off all my monitors overnight and the next day, everything is exactly where they should be.

    Many thanks for all that worked on the multi monitor part! The work has payed off!

    Liked by 2 people

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  5. I think, you’ve mixed the Very-Hi and the 15-min statistics? Looks like you do this manually / not automated yet?

    Is there a graph, of how these numbers develop over time?

    Anyway it is really soothing to come here and read about the progress when you sometimes stumble on all the … erm disappointment that can be found in some long-standing bug reports.

    Liked by 1 person

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  6. As always fantastic!
    I’m already testing Plasma 5.27 on Tumbleweed and it’s awesome!
    Thank you very much for the great work and I hope this year to be able to contribute with a donation.

    Liked by 3 people

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  9. Sigh… Let’s hope Plasma 6 will have touchpad gestures customisation, until that a fix for Night Color autostart in X session for Plasma 5.27 is enough for me.

    And I hope 5.27 won’t break my multi-monitor setup, which has been working fine still.

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  12. I’ve struggled to teach myself to move the cursor up and sideways to window thumbnails in Task Manager previews, because obviously moving your cursor over other icons would dismiss those previews. I didn’t file a bug, I assumed that’s just the way it has to be. It sounds like Bharadwaj Raju fixed this 🏆🎉👏

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  13. Thank you very much for the hard work! The new way to handle multi monitors is indeed amazing! All bugs I had reported in the past are gone. And the new custom tiling system is also so so good. I guess we will have a long time now to enjoy Plasma 5.27. Thanks again 😉

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    2. Just tried out the tiling as well, but I am missing a few small things that I think should be included by default.

      I would love to see the size of the area’s I am adjusting in pixels. Right now I have no way to know how many pixels wide/tall a area is.

      I also noticed with the x amount of pixel gap, is counted twice when you have a screen, for example, split in half.

      Outside to the monitor;s edge is a proper 8 pixels (in my case) but in the middle where tiling area 1 and 2 touch, it’s 2 times 8 pixels for each area for a total of 16 pixels.

      I would love to also see that this part is also 8 pixels.

      Hope I made sense.

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  14. Hi Nate,
    with the current 5.27.0 on fedora37 and wayland, the screensaver/monitor standby (screen energy saving) does not work – the monitors keep staying active.
    There is an ‘internet’ recommendation to switch off kscreen2
    systemsettings5 > startup and shutdown > background-services > kScreen 2: disabled
    and, this does not help to solve the above problem

    Anyway, what does kscreen2 normally do? Can you help on this?

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    1. Screen switch off stopped working for me too. I noticed that recently the lock screen displays but my screens don’t turn off. I’m using Fedora 37 Wayland session on a laptop with external monitor over DisplayPort. I set System Settings > Power Management > Energy Saving > Dim screen (I’ve never knowingly used this before) to 1 minute, … > Screen Energy Saving checked with “Switch off after” to 2 minutes, and System Settings > Workspace Behavior > Screen Locking Lock screen automatically to checked after 3 minutes. Results: no dimming, no screens turn off, and after 3 minutes, the lock screen displays.

      I filed KDE bug 410799. You can add a shortcut in System Settings -> Shortcuts -> Power Management -> Turn Monitor off , e.g. Meta+Alt+L, or write a script that sends ‘Turn Off Screen’ to powerdevil over D-Bus.

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  15. Can Elisa finally change playback speed? Listening to podcasts or audiobooks was unbearable at 1x speed so I uninstalled it since VLC does permit to speed up since ages. I know there’s Kast for podcastas, and sure somebody has written some app for playing audiobooks, but I don’t want 2 or 3 apps when just one application should be needed, ergo my choice for VLC. But I really liked Elisa and I’d rather use a KDE app, so, has been Elisa improved in regards to this issue? If not, do you plan to do it or you don’t consider it among Elisa’s goals?

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    1. No, Elisa doesn’t have this feature. If someone wants to implement it though, I won’t object.

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