Another week, another dose of Usability and Productivity in KDE land! We picked up a lot of great improvements to Discover, a much-requested change to allow Kate and Dolphin to be run with the root user account again, and quite a lot of important bugfixes. Take a look!
New Features
- Discover now lets you optionally view an app’s dependencies (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.14.0):
(Expect the user interface for this feature to change and improve before the release!) - Kate (and other apps using the KTextEditor framework) now have syntax highlighting for OpenSCAD files (Julian Stirling, KDE Frameworks 5.47)
- Spectacle can now be configured to save within dynamic sub-directories (e.g. based on the date), creating the path when necessary (Marco Scarpetta, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
Bugfixes
- Dolphin and Kate can once again be launched when logged in as the root user, and Dolphin displays a warning (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
- It’s no longer possible to accidentally replace an existing file when selecting the filename for a pasted image (Elvis Angelaccio, KDE Frameworks 5.47)
- The alt+tab window switcher shortcut now works more reliably (Sontol Bonggol, KDE Frameworks 5.47)
- Discover no longer lets you log out while updates are in progress (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)
- On System Settings’ Mouse page, the Acceleration Profile setting now works (Roman Gilg, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)
- When using the slideshow wallpaper feature, hidden images and images in hidden folders no longer appear (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.12.6)
- The Glide effect no longer inappropriately affects Plasma’s logout screen (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
UI Polish & Improvement
- The Application Launcher menu (Kickoff) now switches tabs instantly on mouse hover (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
- Discover’s Install button is now more button-like and has a green background, for greater obviousness (Aleix Pol, KDE Frameworks 5.47):
- Discover now handles .flakpakref more gracefully by offering to install the Flatpak backend if it’s not already installed (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
- Discover is now more clear about when an update update will replace some packages with other ones (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.14.0):
- KWin’s blur effect now remains blurry during animations (Alex Nemeth, KDE Plasma 5.13.0)
- Dolphin’s context menu now includes “Sort By” and “View Mode” submenus (Someone who would prefer to be known as “Nerdopolis Turfwalker”, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
- You can now drag-and-drop an image onto Gwenview’s window to instantly view that image in Gwenview (Huon Imberger, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
See all the names of people who worked hard to make the computing world a better place? That could be you next week! Getting involved isn’t all that tough, and there’s lots of support available. Give it a try today! It’s easy and fun and important.
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Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Bug 391819 was fixed by Alex Nemeth.
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Oops, how did I forget that!? Fixed, and thanks very much for letting me know.
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Hi,
As always, very nice updates ! thank you !
What could be nice in Discover is to have the version before/after of the proposed update.
As in openSUSE with “zypper list-update” : https://www.cyberciti.biz/media/new/faq/2018/05/zypper-list-updates.jpg
Very useful with the colors.
Best regards,
Syvolc
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You know, the same thing occurred to me a few days ago! I plan to submit a patch soon that does just that.
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Fantastic updates as always. You guys do a great job.
By the way, it would be great can include all the AUR packages within Discover and dispose all them from one only place. I hope this could be possible.
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It’s a common feature request among Arch users. I know it’s not planned right now because the lead developer is wary of adding too many distro-specific features. But I can try to make the case. Thanks for your input!
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Not to bother anyone, but I’d like to add that not even the Archlinux developers support the AUR.
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Although I’m a Manjaro user and it would be nice to see/search AUR packages in Discover, I don’t thing it’s a good idea. First, AUR is not entirely safe and there are specific issues that can come around when installing AUR packages (not all packages are well maintained) and Discover would have to expand itself tremendously to cope with those issues (terminal output is an easy and informative way to deal with them, throwing it all to GUI may be more problematic). Also AUR helpers are a big topic. There are many of them (and such program as Discover would have to use them or write and maintain its own tool) and usually as soon as they are integrated with certain package management GUI (like Octopi) their development stops and we need integration with new ones, and so on.
AUR is an awesome repo but its specifics need dedicated solutions so Discover shouldn’t jump into that quickly. Maybe in the feature there will be some Discover API for distro specific extension? But that can lead to a mess… So there is lot to think about it.
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Many thanks to all contributors !
Great to see old and newer issues and feature request being adressed at a fast pace !
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Thanks, I’m glad you’re happy with all the work!
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I think that the text on that green (#27AD60) button must be white instead of black.
If we use YIQ (a color space which reflects human perception better than RGB) to measure color contrast more accurately we can find out that, while the used green is in the borderline for contrast between B&W, white still offers better contrast in this color space.
The formula goes like this:
x=(r*299+g*587+b*114)/1000
Each channel gets normalized in accordance to its impact in the eye. Then:
if x >= 128 the text must be black.
According to that equation, rgb(39, 173, 96) value is 124, so it has a better contrast with white, even if only slightly.
My source:
https://24ways.org/2010/calculating-color-contrast/
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Yep, that’s definitely planned, but didn’t make it in just yet. There’s plenty of time before Plasma 5.14 to make this change, not to worry. 🙂
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As always very interesting to read and it’s great to see all the improvements and bugfixes!
I’m especially interested in Plasma on Wayland. My personal workflow is stable, though it could see some more love as well 🙂 From my testing so far Plasma 5.13 will be again a big step forward.
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Yes, we think so too! 🙂
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Just a note: I did not fix bug #394689, I just pushed the patch on behalf of the author.
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Oops, thanks for catching that! Fixed.
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Nice! I love to see KDE Plasma advancing.
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Hey Nate. Again thank you very much for working so hard to improve KDE!
I have another support question, about Okular and how to debug a freeze. What happens is that on a specific document and after doing a specific set of actions within Okular, the whole system freezes and becomes unresponsive. How in the world’s name can I debug something like this? 😦
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You could use gdb: https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Debugging/Debugging_with_GDB
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