Get ready for a humongous week for KDE’s Usability and Productivity initiative! KDE developers and contributors squashed a truly impressive number of bugs this week, all the while adding features and polishing the user interface.
New Features
- Discover now supports Snap Channels, allowing people to choose whether to install stable or beta versions of Snap apps (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.14.0)
- Kate can now use a different color scheme from the system’s global color scheme (Thomas Fjellstrom, KDE Applications 18.08.0):
Bugfixes
- The Kickoff Application Launcher’s “Search For” entries now work again (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.12.7)
- Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when switching Activities (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.48)
- The Desktop Grid effect no longer unnecessarily switches activities (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.13.4)
- The Font Management System Settings page doesn’t yet work on Wayland, so it no longer appears there (previously it would taunt you by showing up, and then crash when you tried to use it) (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.13.3)
- When removing installed Snap apps with Discover, the “Remove” button no longer changes its text (Aleix Pol, KDE Plasma 5.12.7)
- Dolphin no longer asks for confirmation before moving an item to the trash until an unrelated setting is changed (Алексей Шилин (Alexei Shilin), KDE Frameworks 5.48)
- Fixed a rare situation where Gwenview 18.04.x could take up to 30 seconds to launch (Henrik Fehlauer, KDE Applications 18.04.3)
- Using Ctrl+left click/right click to zooms now zooms at the correct speed when you click quickly (Henrik Fehlauer, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
- Fixed a number of bugs with syntax highlighting for the C++, Python, Lua, JavaScript, and CoffeeScript programming languages in Kate, KWrite, and other apps using the KSyntaxKighlighting framework (Nibaldo González and Jonathan Poelen, KDE Frameworks 5.49)
- Kate’s Quick Open feature now works again when using Qt 5.11 (Sven Brauch KDE Applications 18.04.3)
UI Polish & Improvement
- The Kickoff application launcher’s “Computer” tab now shows entries grouped, just like they are in Dolphin (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.12.7):
- Standalone widgets now display a better icon for the “remove” button on their handles, so it’s much less likely that you’ll accidentally remove a widget when you just mean to hide the handle (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.14.0,):
- Shadows in Breeze have been further refined, and now feature softer corners and edges and a more true-to-life lighting model (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.14.0):
- Icon previews in Dolphin are now sharper in HiDPI mode (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Applications 18.08.0)
- Improved the layout of the View Properties windows (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 18.08.0):
There are still more bugs I’d like to get fixed ASAP, though, including a number of high-profile regressions with the mouse and touchpad settings in Plasma 5.13. I hope very much that we can fix these soon. If anyone reading this feels like they could help out, please do so! We’re happy to lend a hand when first getting started as a KDE contributor. There are lots of other ways to get involved, too.
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. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
[oops, it seems my post got lost, re-posting]
As usual, this is amazing & much appreciated !!!
BTW, I should probably file a bugreport : I noticed that quick-lists are displayed when right clicking an application icon works with started apps, pinned apps, and in the programs menu, but not with applications shortcuts in the panel and not in the favorites list.
Another thing I noticed is that video previews are not displayed anymore *inside* folders previews.
I’ll definitely check if there are bug reports about those 🙂
As for me, my biggest problem is clearly kwin decorations disappearing randomly once a day / a couple days when starting apps that disable compositing. It occured with fresh installs and 3 different GPUs in Neon and many different apps (video players, emulators, games). But as it seems I’m the only one, I’ll have to find a way to get a log or something…
Cheers & thanks so much for this huge amount of very useful work !
Due to eyestrain I cannot contribute directly unfortunately. I support through Patreon at least 🙂
LikeLike
The quick list should work for favorite apps in Kickoff– at least it does for me. The fact that it doesn’t work for panel launchers is a bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=396539
Your issue with video previews on folders may be https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=238690
LikeLike
Oops, I mixed things up. It does work with favorites but no from the apps in the K menu hierarchy (when browsing categories 🙂
Cheers & thanks !!
LikeLike
Okay, I’m shutting up now, please forget all I said about this, the 2 bug reports you mentioned cover all the issues 🙂 Sorry for the noise !
LikeLike
As always, awesome job. This feels like you were working on crack – every week lot of goodies :D. Do you ever get tired? Not that I’m complaining ;).
This reminded me… How do I get snaps support on Discover on Arch based distros? After installing Discover it has flatpack searching and install functions by default. I can have snapd in system and yet Discover doesn’t seem to see it or do anything with it.
Do I have to install or configure something extra? I tried searching for that info but no luck. I like the idea of Discover being a nice frontend for snaps and flatpacks (if needed).
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s not just me, of course–these improvements are the result of dozens of people’s hard work!
You need to install the Snap backend to use snaps. Discover lets you do this from within itself, on the Settings page.
For that matter, you need to install the PackageKit backend too, since the Arch packagers don’t make it a required dependency like it is in most other distros. See https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/58524?project=0
LikeLike
I already have a packagekit-qt5. In Discover Settings I see:
https://imgur.com/SkvIivt
So nothing to add or mark and I’m no closer to solve this mystery.
LikeLike
See all those “undefined” entries? Looks like a bug with in Discover or with your local configuration somehow.
LikeLike
Those “undefined” are just pacman repos. They work without an issue so I don’t think that is the problem. Lack of snap integration is. In theory it should be there by default but it isn’t why? What does it miss? I have snapd and snappy packages installed.
Snaps are working because I installed some.
Most frustrating part is: there no info about this anywhere. I would suspect it will work out of the box if snapd and snappy are installed, just as it was with flatpak. ON Ubuntu systems the situation is opposite, snaps are there automatically but no flatpaks. However I haven’t tested yet if installing flatpak package on Ubuntu based system adds it by default to Discover.
LikeLike
Hmm, I would recommend filing a bug on Discover. Something’s weird there.
LikeLike
I’ll do that. I hoped you just gave me some easy info: install this: configure that and I’ll be good to go, alas it doesn’t sound so simple now if the answer isn’t on top of your head.
Anyway, thanks for checking. Sometimes one can go crazy wondering: am I missing something simple, something so obvious and that is why nobody is mentioning it or is there really a bug?
Also a weird this is: the last section with installed engines is called “Missing engines” and it shows engines that are installed… So either that is some description bug or a translation bug… I guess I have to report that too.
LikeLike
Can someone notice this bug (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391647), fixed in wayland but still in X
LikeLike
That bug tracks the issue on Wayland and isn’t closed yet. Please leave a comment saying that you can reproduce it on X–and mention your Qt version!
LikeLike
Did, thank you.
LikeLike
Hi! I made a suggestion on KDE bugzilla that I think would improve usability A LOT! Could you please take a look? (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=396524).
Btw nice work, I really love KDE!
Thanks.
LikeLike
Not a bad idea!
LikeLiked by 1 person