Here are the results of week 56 of KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative. We’ve been working on Plasma 5.16 features and fixing old bugs in Plasma 5.12 and beyond.
One additional thing I’d like to mention is that we’re aware that many users of Discover in Plasma 5.14 are suffering from an inability to either check for updates or update their systems. This issue is fixed in Plasma 5.15 and beyond, but we’re working on a fix for Plasma 5.14 users that can be backported. Sorry for the breakage, everyone!
Anyway, onto the good stuff…
New Features
- KSysGuard’s search field now accepts a comma-separated list of process names or IDs so you can monitor just a few things at once (Tomaz Canabrava, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- The Networks widget now has a button to display a search field to help you find a particular network from among the available choices (Valerio Pilo, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- When dragging-and-dropping icons on the desktop over other icons, the dragged-over icons no longer disappear under certain circumstances (Oleg Solovyov, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
- Desktop icons no longer sometimes get scrambled or rearranged after a reboot (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
- Desktop icons no longer sometimes become visibly duplicated after creating a new folder (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.12.8)
- System Settings’ sidebar list back button now always has the correct color no matter what color scheme is being used (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
- QML Comboboxes always show all items in their pop-up, and can now be closed by clicking anywhere else in the window just like QWidgets Comboboxes (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
- Okular now properly displays links in Markdown documents that span more than one line (Albert Astals Cid, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
User Interface Improvements
- You can now right-click on networks in the Network widget to expose a “Configure…” action (Valerio Pilo, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- KWin’s blur effect now looks more natural and correct to the human eye by not unnecessary darkening the area between blurred colors (Alex Nemeth, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- Print Manager now indicates what’s asking for your password and where it will be sent, which the last of the barriers to making it available on Debian (Michael Weghown, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- Kirigami Toolbar buttons now all have the same visual style as other KDE-style toolbars on the desktop (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.55)
- After opening a new tab in Dolphin, that new tab’s view now automatically gains keyboard focus (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
- Spectacle no longer displays both “Full Screen (All Monitors)” and “Current Screen” options when your computer only has one screen (Emirald Mateli, 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!
If you find KDE software useful, consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
amazing work
thanks to all who help make this possible especially you Nate
keep climbing
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Thank you Tomaz, filtering on multiple values will be awesome ❤
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Agreed. That’s great!
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exactly, really thanks for that!
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Wow, that blur effect!
I’ve only seen it properly working on some professional graphics software! And I can count those apps with the fingers on my hand.
Not that all the other improvements aren’t amazing, is just that that one specially; I wouldn’t have dreamed of seeing it being solved on the OS level when a good deal of specialized software never even notices.
As a Neon user, I’m elated!
Thanks guys for selflessly dedicating another week of your valuable time to improve a project that everyone can use. And also thank you, Nate for always keeping us on the loop. After you started this blog I found myself interested in contributing to KDE too, I’m a graphic designer so I can’t contribute much code, so at the moment I’ve only reported bugs, but I hope soon I would be able to do more.
Cheers!
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The new blur effect is indeed awesome! Nate, can you tell me which theme anemeth uses in his screenshots, where the window decoration (title bar and surrounding) is blurred as well? It looks like a Breeze, but I haven’t found any option yet.
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I used BreezeBlurred there
https://github.com/alex47/BreezeBlurred
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You’re very welcome!
Graphics designers are totally welcome, BTW. There’s lots of work do be done with Breeze icons, for example. Check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/design
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Great work on network manager. It needed some attention.
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What other issues do you experience?
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I’ll give you one that is a usability nightmare (specific to a plugin though):
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=385395
The two problems solved this week will greatly improve the usability.
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Just dropped by to thank you (and other KDE developers) for the awesome work. It’s always a pleasurable weekly lecture that keeps me and others excited about Plasma.
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Nice improves on Spectacle and Plasma, Plasma 5.16 promises to be awesome, KDE never stops to improve their software, just amazing.
Thanks as always for your awesome work Nate.
Bests ^^.
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I know, the rate of improvement is always amazing to me too.
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Thanks for your great effort. Could you please check #398039 ?
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Sure, I’ll check it out.
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Hi Nate, I really want to contribute to KDE, but I don’t know where to start from. I’m a beginner with programming, and I’m unable to find an entry point that can help me figure out how to deal with tools and code bases as huge as KDE’s.
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In general, the best place to start is to “scratch your itch”: find something that’s both annoying and looks easy to fix (e.g. wrong icon, bad English text, etc) and just dive into the code. See https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/development#Choose_what_to_do
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Hi ajyotirmay,
you can search in bugs.kde.org for bugs with keyword “junior-jobs”, bugs that are easy to solve for a new entry. In the same page linked by Nate, search for “junior jobs”, click on the link and you’ll get the full list.
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New interesting report.
New Spanish translation:
– https://victorhckinthefreeworld.com/2019/02/04/mejorando-kde-en-facilidad-de-uso-y-productividad-semana-4-de-2019/
Happy hackin’
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Filtering on multiple processes was always possible. The search field accepts regular expressions, hence ‘plasmashell|kwin|1702’ does the trick.
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Guys, why isn’t there a “refresh” icon in the network plasmoid for wireless yet? This is very very needed. Always, when you switch between wifi networks and the new one appeard like few seconds ago (i.e hot stop), it’s not visable for a long while.
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In fact, it’s currently being discussed. There are upstream limitations that we’re trying to work around to reduce the need for one in the first place at the moment.
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Could you please look at this regression https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=390804 ?
It was marked as a job for junior developer, meaning simple to solve yet noone does that. At this point we have to rename Name of Applications that have similar names and icons.
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Yep, will investigate
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