This week in Usability & Productivity we did a lot of work on our Plasma 5.12 long-term support release and performance improvements for KIO and Baloo (many of which are not individually significant enough to be mentioned here, but will add up to some great improvements over time). Lots of nice bugfixes and new features snuck in, too.
New Features
- Plasma’s Network Manager now allows configuring IP Tunnel settings (Pranav Gade, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
- In Konsole, it’s now possible to quickly switch between the current and previous tab using ctrl+tab (Thomas Surrel, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- Choosing a particular app as your default browser now actually works when the one listed in the combobox is already the one you want and you don’t need to change it (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
- GTK-based apps run in Plasma no longer use the wrong cursor by default (Fabian Vogt, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
- Made the Global Menu work with a few more odd apps (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.14.4)
- The Audio Settings page is now always translated properly when opened in its standalone form (Albert Astals Cid, KDE Plasma 5.14.4)
- Fixed a few ways that the Comics widget could crash (Pavel Mos, KDE Plasma 5.14.4)
- Text in System Settings’ scrollable sidebar (as well as other users of the Kirigami UI toolkit and throughout Plasma) no longer displays graphical glitches when scrolling with a touchpad (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
- It’s now possible to find files rated 5 stars with the Baloo file indexing system (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
- Improved small file copy speed in KIO by being smarter about how timestamps are compared (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
- Radically improved small file copy speed in KIO (14 hours to 10 minutes, in one case) with some code optimizations that are too clever for me to understand them (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
- In Dolphin, when using icon view and icons are sorted by size, going back no longer selects multiple unrelated files or folders (Thomas Surrel, KDE Applications 18.12.0)
User Interface Improvements
- Filenames on desktop icons now have enough horizontal space to be legible even when their icons are very tiny (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.12.8):
- Filenames on desktop icons are now easier to read when the wallpaper is very light-colored or visually busy (me: nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.12.8):
- The Info Center app now opens to a sensible default window size so no scrollbars are required and nothing gets cut off (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.12.8):
- When enough apps have been added to the Kickoff Application Launcher’s favorites list that it becomes scrollable, it now defaults to showing the top of the list, not the bottom (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
- Comboboxes in QML and Kirigami apps and Plasma now open on click, not on click-and-release (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.53)
- AppImage apps now get their own icons when previews are turned off (Friedrich Kossebau, KDE Frameworks 5.53):
- Breeze icons for muted and off status are now better and more consistent (Rafael Brandmaier, KDE Frameworks 5.54):
- Okular’s document display now stays aligned to the available viewing area better when using keyboard navigation (Tobias Deiminger, KDE Applications 18.12.0)
- When opening multiple files in Kate using the command line, the files are opened in new tabs that have the same ordering that was specified on the command line (Guillermo Molteni, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
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!
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Adventures in Linux and KDE 
great work
you guys keep make kde more interesting
thanks for u all
i hope this blog come everyday !!
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Thanks, It’s good to know it’s appreciated!
A daily blog would require a whole team, I think. Even just putting this together every week takes up a significant amount of time. It’s not a trivial thing. 🙂
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Awesome!
Not sure I understand this one thou:
“Comboboxes in QML and Kirigami apps and Plasma now open on click, not on click-and-release”.
I’m used to behavior that EVERY CLICK works after release, never before. This saved me from doing many serious mistakes where I accidentally clicked something but immediately realized it, so I held the click, moved the cursor over “not allowed” area and then released it, so there was no effect, which was often life-saving.
This works on Windows and Linux everywhere, at least as far I could notice. Changing it to opposite doesn’t sound like safe or good idea. Working on release is a most common mechanism on clicks. This also works in a browser (easy to test, click on any link – nothing happens, release button, a link is activated) so it’s the natural way of behavior and also a safeguard.
Maybe there is some specific need or reason for using it another way on kirigami? I’m just curious, what is the reason behind it.
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+ 1
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The comboboxes in QWidgets based apps (Dolphin etc.) already have this behaviour. This change merely aligns the behaviour of QML based ones (Discover etc.) with it.
Just opening a combobox doesn’t trigger any action, so even if you do it by mistake there is no harm done
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>This works on Windows and Linux everywhere, at least as far I could notice
In GTK apps comboboxes open on click as well
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I don’t think it’s a problem here because nothing different from what is already selected in the combobox will be selected until you release on a different option. This change just makes QML/Kirigami comboboxes more consistent and faster to work with. You can still release off to the side to avoid selecting a different option.
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The change simply makes QML and Kirigami apps consistent with how it’s always been for QWidgets apps: comboboxes are *supposed* to open on click on Linux. It’s a productivity feature. You can click, drag down to the item, and release all in one gesture. It’s the same way menus work. macOS does this too.
Once you learn about this and get used to doing it, the clunky Windows workflow becomes unbearable.
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Great stuff. Just with the application dashboard would have an easier custom icon size control and the filenames aren’t truncated as much
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Yes, it would be nice if this could be configured so that it works more like on Android.
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Agreed. We tried to fix the truncation issue, but somehow it came back recently. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=362986
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Because of these blog posts, for the past couple months i have been in love with Plasma. I am kind of curious though, how are the framework updates handled? Are they released whenever they are ready, or are they only released in the next major plasma update? I still don’t have the icon fixes from the last frameworks update in solus or kubuntu backports?
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You can check out the schedules here: https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Frameworks
KDE releases a new Frameworks version once a month; 12 times a year. It’s up to distros to determine how often to package and deliver their software to their users.
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Thanks. That’s really weird… I have 5.52 but the icons are no different… Yet in KDE Neon Git they are the new emblems and icons
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Run rm ~/.cache/icons*. Does that fix the problem? If not, it sounds like a distro packaging issue. If so, please open a bug report on bugs.kde.org, since they should be getting updated automatically without needing for you to do that.
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This is always a very interesting read. Before discovering this site all these new features would have probably stayed under the radar until I accidentally found them.
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new report, new spanish translation:
https://victorhckinthefreeworld.com/2018/12/04/mejorando-kde-en-facilidad-de-uso-y-productividad-parte-47/
Happy hacking!
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