This week in Usability & Productivity, part 36

Usability & Productivity 2 Minutes

Greetings, KDE-loving humans! This week’s Usability & Productivity is a heavy one in terms of importance. We scored awesome fixes and improvements through the KDE software stack for subjects as varied as Libinput mouse and touchpad device handling, Task Manager icon sorting for LibreOffice, and a snazzy new unified mailbox in KMail. Have a look:

New Features

  • KMail can now display a unified inbox (Daniel Vrátil, KDE Applications 18.12.0):

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

Next week, your name could be in this list! Just check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters.

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Published by Nate

Published

24 thoughts on “This week in Usability & Productivity, part 36”

    1. Oops, fixed! Thanks for bringing this to my attention. The Beta hadn’t been released yet when I wrote that section and I forgot to update it last night before the post was posted.

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    1. The first solution he tried is the officially supported one. The bugs that he encountered are being actively fixed, and in fact I regularly blog about them. Using the font DPI to approximate scaling is not recommended because it just causes other problems that are harder to fix.

      Also, in Plasma 5.14, the scaling is indeed automatically applied to GTK apps as long as you choose an integer scale factor (e.g. 2 or 3). This is because GTK only officially supports integer scaling at the moment.

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  4. As Plasma 5.14 is not too far away, I would like to see a focus on Wayland bugs. Even though it works good already, there are several bugs that would require attention and could improve the usability on Wayland a lot. Just like the example of Kmail, it provides now a new feature of a unified inbox, but on Wayland you cannot even drag and drop a mail or the window is flickering if you overlap it with another window. Or then there are the misplaced right click menu’s on Plasma Wayland. Anyway, KDE is great and good to see all these improvements 🙂

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    1. Unfortunately, this feature is not supported with the modern Libinput driver, so any further refinements for the feature are unlikely. 😦 The first step is for Libinput to support the feature.

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    2. Thanks for the reply. So also if enabling this feature in the System Manager it doesn’t interact with the NumLock: enabling NumLock in fact it is not possible to use the Numeric Keyboard when browsing Browsing from keyboard is enabled.

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  6. I can’t access the Phabricator link at the moment, so I’m not sure which terminology you’re using now… Is it “Suspend” and “Hibernate”? They aren’t really consistent with each other; “Sleep” and “Hibernate” would be a better alternative in my opinion. Especially seeing “Suspend” could mean either “Suspend to RAM” (aka sleep) or “Suspend to disk” (aka hibernate). Of course you can deduce which one it is when it’s next to a “Hibernate” button, but it still seems less than ideal.

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  9. Greetings and thanks for the great work you do with Plasma 5 that now I use on my PC for over a year.
    I noticed that with the latest versions of Plasma the weather plasmoid is not as nice as before, there is a lot of unused space, I do not understand if it’s a bug or it’s wanted. Greetings and I apologize for my bad English.

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