Hey look, there have been 42 of these Usability & Productivity posts. This week there’s a lot of in-progress work I’m tracking or working on myself that didn’t quite make it, but what I can report on is hopefully no disappointment! See for yourself:
New Features
- Implemented screen reader support for desktop icons, so visually impaired users can now read the icons on the desktop (Christian Hempfling, KDE Plasma 5.12.8). This is important work and we’re very interested in mentoring anyone else who has experience with or interest in accessibility work. If you’re interested, check out our page on how to get involved!
- Okular has a new “Zoom to 100%” menu item that uses the standard Ctrl+0 keyboard shortcut (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 18.12.0):
Bugfixes
- Discover no longer always shows the “What’s New” section on app pages even when there isn’t any relevant information there (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.2)
- Plasma no longer crashes when changing the icon of an app launcher shortcut (Ivan Čukić, KDE Frameworks 5.52)
- Okular no longer crashes when clicking on a link in a local PDF file that points to another local PDF file (Albert Astals Cid, KDE Applications 18.08.3)
- When saving an annotated PDF file opened from a symlink, Okular no longer replaces the symlink with a new copy of the saved document (Albert Astals Cid, KDE Applications 18.08.3)
- In Konsole, it’s once again possible to double-click on a line of text that’s longer than the window’s width and have the whole thing selected (Pavel Khlebovich (KDE Applications 18.12.0)
- Fixed one way that SFTP connections could fail (Harald Sitter, KDE Applications 18.12.0)
- Monochrome status emblems now change their color properly when the icon is selected with a full-size highlight (KDE Applications 18.12.0):
UI Polish & Improvement
- Discover now consistently uses the phrase “Checking for updates…” (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
- It is now possible to configure whether scrolling over the virtual desktop pager will “wrap around” when reaching the end of the virtual desktop list (Phuong Nguyen, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
- When performing a search using the Kickoff Application Launcher, if the cursor happens to be located in the place where search results show up, the item that appears under the cursor is no longer automatically and unexpectedly selected (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
- The context menu for desktop icons now toggles between the “Move to Trash” and “Delete” items when the Shift key is pressed, just like in Dolphin (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.14.3)
- Emblem icons that badge files and folders are now better-positioned and don’t obscure so much of the item itself (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.52)
- The Ctrl+w keyboard shortcut now quits Dolphin if there’s only one tab open (Alexander Saoutkin, KDE Applications 18.12.0)
Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!
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 
Hi Nate, I just like to tell you that I love to sip my cup of coffee and to go through the list of fixed bugs and newly introduced features every Sunday morning for the past 42 weeks! 🙂
This time you cheated a little bit and made the list longer than it should be: “The context menu for desktop icons …” has been mentioned twice. 🙂
Something I would really love to see on this blog posts are improvements regarding Wayland, especially fractional scaling [1,2] and the bug on X, which introduces horizontal lines with fractional HiDPI scaling [2].
In particular the first bug, inter alia, hinders me from moving to Wayland as forcing font DPI seems not a good option to me and I often attach a non HDPI monitor.
[1] https://phabricator.kde.org/T8501, https://phabricator.kde.org/R110:3a0e95629912d8c82d14e2b8c754ebbdbd4364f7
[2] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373232
Regards
Eric
LikeLiked by 1 person
Whoops, fixed!
As for the scaling issues, I agree and I’m aware of them. Unfortunately, a lot of the core Plasma developers have a fairly dim view of Qt’s fractional scaling implementation. We’re discussing the issue here: https://phabricator.kde.org/T9500
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks Nate, for the great report always.
LikeLiked by 1 person
You’re welcome!
LikeLiked by 1 person
kde bigger every week ^.^
LikeLiked by 1 person
Can I post some suggestion here?
– I’m using encrypted external disk. When I mount it, window “notifications about devices” shows, then I have to click icon to hide it (no other way),
– if I suspend laptop, then disconnect disk, after waking laptop I am not able to mount (ofc if I reconnect disk) it again. I’m getting message that mount point already exist.
LikeLike
The first one was just fixed in Plasma 5.14.1: https://phabricator.kde.org/D16045
For the second one, please file a bug on bugs.kde.org on the frameworks-solid product. Thanks!
LikeLike
Hello Nate, thank you again for your Usability and Productivity post. I may ask you if there’s any plan to add touchpad inertial scrolling on Plasma desktop. For me it’s currently the biggest hole in the usability of Plasma.
LikeLike
Yes, I definitely want to turn my attention to this at some point soon. Thanks for the reminder; I’ve added it to my formal to-do list.
LikeLike
Wayland may be interesting but… I check it once in a few months. A few days ago my wayland adventure looked like that:
I logged in, NextCloud sync app showed a window, which I closed immediately and the wayland crashed to the SDDM… Wayland session lasted a second and not more.
One of the reasons there are not many wayland testers. There is nothing to test yet, it simply doesn’t work. To be honest, in the past, it seemed to work for a bit longer but so many things didn’t work, wayland was slow and crashy and it oftentimes crashed entire OS so I learned to be scared of it :(.
Maybe in a few years, we will have something to look at and be excited about the progress. Wayland info was louder a year or two ago and lately, it’s been quiet. Probably people got disappointed and bored with the lack of acceptable results that they could see and play with.
LikeLike
I’m pretty sure I know what’s causing your crash. Closing windows with some decorations crashes KWin (Breeze works fine). It will be fixed with Qt 5.12. This makes Wayland seem pretty bad of course, although it’s actually not that bad besides that bug
LikeLiked by 1 person
Maybe one thing to add to your list: Kate got a new option to close when the last tab is closed (just as Dolphin).
https://phabricator.kde.org/D16169
Disclosure: I’m the author of that patch 😉
LikeLike
Oh gosh, how did I forget that one!? I’ll mention it in next week’s post.
LikeLike
New report…
New spanish translation:
– https://victorhckinthefreeworld.com/2018/10/30/mejorando-kde-en-facilidad-de-uso-y-productividad-parte-42/
Happy hacking!
LikeLiked by 1 person