Here’s another big one, folks!
Regular readers might have noticed that I’ve stopped the weekly Discover posts. I’ve decided to centralize that information here, and so I’d like to highlight several weeks’ worth of awesome new features and improvements for Discover:
Discover
- Discover now shows star ratings on lists and detail pages (Me, Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.13.0):
- Discover now displays app icons in conformance with the active icon theme, which also fixes the issue of Discover showing Nautilus’s icon for Dolphin in Debian-based distros (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.13.0):
- In Discover, when an app is available from multiple Flatpak repos, it’s now possible to choose and change which version is shown first by default (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)
- In Discover, apps are no longer sorted by reverse alphabetical order under certain circumstances (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)
- Discover’s Flatpak transactions are now cancellable (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)
- Discover no longer crashes when Flatpak transactions are canceled (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)
- When using Discover to perform system updates, unchecked items no longer ever become spontaneously re-checked when the “Update” button is clicked (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)
- Discover now always displays the same number of updates on both the sidebar and on the updates page (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.6)
- Discover’s sort order chooser (added in 5.13.0) now shows what the current sort order is without having to click on it (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)
- Lists in Discover (and all other Kirigami apps) now have vastly better scrolling performance (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.45)
- List items on the Settings page in Discover (and all other Kirigami apps) now have a more appropriate desktop-specific UI for the hidden buttons: rather than demanding that you swipe or drag the item to the left, they appear on mouse hover (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.46):
In future posts, Discover improvements will be shown inline along with all the other changes.
Next up, here’s the week’s process on the Open/save dialog project:
Open/Save dialog project
- When a file name is highlighted, the extension now remains unselected (Alex Nemeth)
- The zoom slider now has a minimum size so it can’t become uselessly tiny when the window is small, and the zoom buttons disable themselves when the maximum or minimum zoom levels have been reached (Henrik Fehlauer)
- The Places Panel no longer grows in width by 1px every time an open or save dialog is opened, and its width is now saved if you opt to hide it (Henrik Fehlauer)
- The “Name” and “Filter” boxes are now perfectly aligned with the view above them (Henrik Fehlauer)
- Inline previews are now smooth and pretty just like Dolphin’s (Alex Nemeth):
These improvements will land in KDE Frameworks 5.46.
And of course that’s not all; here’s the usual assortment of miscellaneous goodies:
New Features
- Spectacle’s Rectangular Region mode now has a magnifier effect to help you capture pixel-perfect screenshots (Tao Guo, KDE Applications 18.04.09):
- Okular now supports intelligently changing the focus in editable forms to the “next” form field (Andre Heinecke, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
- Okular now supports form fields that become visible conditionally–e.g. only after another form field is filled in, or a warning is read and acknowledged (Andre Heinecke, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
Bugfixes
- The device notifier no longer erroneously claims that it cannot mount a USB device that it’s in fact just mounted (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.46)
- Custom login sounds now play as expected (Wolfgang Bauer, KDE Plasma 5.12.5)
- Baloo (the file indexing service) no longer stalls and consumes excessive CPU resources when the index database has become corrupted (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.46)
UI Polish & Improvement
- When you drag a file or folder to Konsole, it always pastes the path into the terminal window instead of showing a menu of options (the old menu behavior can be brought back with Settings > Edit Current Profile > Mouse > Uncheck “Disable drag and drop menu for URLs and files”
- Gwenview now remembers and restores the width of the sidebar (Peter Mühlenpfordt, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
- Gwenview’s video player icons are now intelligible (Huon Imberger, KDE Applications 18.08.0):
- Confirmation dialogs for file operations that are not undoable now emphasize this fact with bold text (Me, Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.46):
- Confirmation dialogs for deleting or trashing single files now use a regular dialog rather than a list-style dialog:
- Messages in Spectacle’s Rectangular Region mode now indicate the available shortcuts more clearly, and respect the active color theme (Henrik Fehlauer, KDE Applications 18.08.0):
- User pictures displayed in the User Manager and Kickoff (the systemwide application launcher) are now rendered more clearly and retain their aspect ratio if they’re not square (Kirill Tatunov, KDE Plasma 5.13):
- K3B gained HiDPI support (Andrew Crouthamel, KDE Applications 18.04.1):
If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal.
Just came here to say:
Whoa!
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🙂
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This is epic.
In a week, at very least 3 important bugs I encountered in the past were fixed + tons of improvements + all the discover stuff. For instance I stumbled upon this Baloo issue yesterday.
Thanks again to the whole team !
I’m pretty sure this initiative will be seen as historic in the future.
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Thanks for the kind words!
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Please never let these massive lists stop coming, love it!
Hopefully in the future there will also be made improvements on getting involved. Mainly on things like translation. I’ve looked at all the guides, but it’s too advanced for people like me. 😦
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That’s another major goal, in fact: http://neofytosk.com/post/kde-community-goal-streamlined-onboarding-of-new-contributors—introduction/
We’re always trying to improve that too. Would you mind commenting on the barriers you’ve encountered?
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Hello, Fredrik. Have you tried to contact the translation leader for your language? They might be able to help you get started.
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As always, awesome stuff that keeps us excited!
Your blog posts are always linked on “Plasma is great” thread :D.
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Glad it’s appreciated! 🙂
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I am really interested in the Discover progress: Linux really needs a good option in this regard! Thanks to everyone for their efforts.
For things like the Baloo fix, I have heard some complaints from Kubuntu 18.04 testers around baloo performance and wonder how the best way for them to get the fix is? Will this come to the Kubuntu PPA for 18.04 users or??
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Yes, it will be available via the backports PPA. One thing to keep in mind is that new installs of 18.04 actually disabled the full-text indexer because of issues like these, you you’ll need to turn it on again (System Settings > Search > File Search > check “Also index file content”).
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Thanks for the clarification.
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When I searched for this weired Kwallet bug yesterday, I came across this blog post, which confirmed my experience:
https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/kubuntu-beaver.html
Since upgrading form Kubuntu 17.01 to 18.04, KWallet no longer opens immediately its vault after logging in. This leads to the fact, that it takes minutes for the wifi to connect. Once it connected it disconnects again, just to connect again.
Upgrading to kubuntu staging ppa did not help either. I now completely removed it.. 😦
I think you should bring a lot of attention to KWallet in the future. 🙂
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Agreed. It definitely needs some love.
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Wow! I’ve been following your posts since a couple of weeks, now I must say a big thank to you and all the people involved in this improvements! These really make me wanna install KDE Neon or a rolling distro to try them 😀 when I have money in the future I’ll consider donating to some KDE projects… in the meanwhile: thank you! keep the great job.
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A rolling release distro is an excellent idea if you can handle the fact that you’re basically being a beta tester (if so, thanks for that).
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Great work ! 😀 thanks
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> Confirmation dialogs for file operations that are not undoable now emphasize this fact with bold text
Many Android apps instead only hide a deleted file for 5 or so seconds and how a in-window Undo notification instead.
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I know it is a K-name thing, but seeing the K3B screen saying “… and Blu-ray Kreator” just looks like a typo more than anything. To me, this takes away from the fantastic polishing going on in other parts of the software.
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Discover literally killed my KDE Neon last week when it removed core KDE apps and modules while I was trying to remove VLC. I’d still use it when I get around to installing Neon again, because I like the idea of a simple software center. I can see that it’s gotten much better compared to a year ago.
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This is not Discover’s fault, but rather a known KDE Neon packaging bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=379721. Discover even warns you by displaying a list of any packages that need to be removed as part of the operation, which should have sent up some red flags (“Why does VLC want to remove Plasma?”). It’s possible that you clicked through it without reading. If not, and if you’re using a reasonably up-to-date version of Discover, then there’s a bug, and I would encourage you to file one at bugs.kde.org.
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Great update, tons of nice tweaks!
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…Including one of yours!
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I found your reports very interestings! Thanks for the project to improve KDE and Plasma!
I wanted start to translate the reports to spanish, and started with this:
https://victorhckinthefreeworld.com/2018/05/07/mejorando-kde-en-facilidad-de-uso-y-productividad-parte-17/
Happy hacking!
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Very cool!
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BTW under what license is your blog published? I couln’t find it…
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Hello Nate
I’m a fan of his work and Plasma. Could I make a suggestion? Would it be possible to include a native method to turn off the extractable devices in addition to the existing one that only dismantles it?
In all the distributions I am forced to do the following:
mkdir -p ~ / .local / share / solid / actions /
vim ~ / .local / share / solid / actions / poweroff.desktop
[Desktop Action open]
Exec = solid-hardware unmount% i && udisksctl power-off -b% d
Icon = kt-stop
Name = Power off Device
[Desktop Entry]
Actions = open;
Type = Service
X-KDE-Action-Custom = true
X-KDE-Solid-Predicate = [IS StorageVolume AND StorageVolume.ignored == false]
Is it possible to include something like this by default in Plasma?
Información del Traductor de GoogleComunidadMóvil
Acerca de GooglePrivacidad y condicionesAyudaDanos tu opinión
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Yes, you are describing https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=270808. Your workaround works for you, but we can’t include it. We need to fix it the proper way.
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Hey, Nate. On my Discover (on 5.12.5) I must sometimes manually choose the ‘check for updates’ or run ‘pkcon refresh’ for Discover to recognise any updates (the ‘checking for updates’ during Discover startup doesn’t find any). I want to file a bug – is there a good way to ‘debug’ this type of problem so I can help you devs?
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Just file it; what you’ve already mentioned is a good enough start!
https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Discover
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Hey Nate, I really exited to read your frequent blog posts. This polishing is really important and makes a good impression. I guess your list is already long. Are the activities already on that list? They once appeared very promising. Unfortunately they never came into a useful state. Are there any plans on improving them?
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IMHO what we need to do is first sort out and hopefully collapse the distinction between activities and virtual desktops. Having these two similar-but-not-identical means of doing many of the same things is a source of confusion and duplication of effort.
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Another distinction should/could be context based activities. e.g. change the default printer depending on the Wifi/Network connection. Enabling activities by time, by network, by Bluetooth connection. What I am also missing is showing different bookmarks, different mailaccounts/folders, different folders in Dolphin-sidebar depending on the activity
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I came here at the bottom to make a suggestion about the “Open/Save dialog” but before sending the message I checked the thing I’d like to see the behavior changed and… it was already changed. What? That updated I did yesterday did the trick and I didn’t notice, wow, sasuga KDE devs!
Thanks for the amazing work!
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🙂
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Thankyou!!! https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=370975 was so confusing, more so with encrypted devices!
So glad to have such an amazing team working on Plasma. Your work has been a breath of fresh air!
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You’re very welcome! 🙂
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Thanks for the effort and the really good work you guys are doing. Since
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I appreciate the kind words. 🙂
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