This is week 59 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative, we’ve got lots of juicy improvements for our apps! In addition to lots of nice improvements for Plasma and Frameworks, the KDE Applications 19.04.0 release comes out in a little under two months and we’ve been working hard to add awesome new features. Check it out:
New Features
- Implemented KRun support in portals, which allows Flatpak apps to be able to open content in other apps using the typical KDE app chooser window (Denis Karpovskiy, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
- Spectacle now has a new default option to remember the current rectangular region selection box, but only until the program is closed (David Redondo, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
- Spectacle now lets the user configure what happens when the screenshot shortcut is pressed while Spectacle is already running (David Redondo, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
- Gwenview can now open Krita image files (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
- In Gwenview, it’s now possible to browse between images using the back and forward buttons that are present on many mice (Anthony Fieroni, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
- Konsole now allows tabs to be created by middle-clicking on empty parts of the tab bar, and also has an option to allow tabs to be closed by middle-clicking on them (Shubham, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- Fixed a case where the current window could appear twice in the Desktop Grid overview (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.15.1)
- Setting the mouse middle button to open the Application Launcher no longer breaks unrelated parts of the Plasma desktop (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.1)
- Discover no longer crashes when opened using a malformed appstream:// URL (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
- The Kickoff Application Launcher no longer unexpectedly and inappropriately responds to window tiling and maximization keyboard shortcuts (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
- The Kickoff Application Launcher no longer allows the username and system information text to overlap under certain circumstances (Matthieu Gras, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
- Returned the default Breeze window and menu shadow color to being pure black, which makes shadows visible again when using the Breeze Dark color scheme (Noah Davis, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- The “Share to Imgur” feature now actually works in all KDE apps that implement it (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
- Dolphin et al. will now show more metadata for AppImage apps when a recent version of the libappimage library is installed (Friedrich Kossebau, KDE Frameworks 5.56):
- Dolphin no longer crashes on quit when there is more than one Activity and one of them is stopped while Dolphin is still running (David Hallas, KDE Applications 18.12.3)
- Fixed odd display of some box characters in Konsole (Mariusz Glebocki, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
User Interface Improvements
- Discover no longer shows a misleading message saying “Please check your connectivity” while loading content immediately after being launched (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.2)
- When about to update the system using Discover, long ugly package version strings no longer get cut off when there’s not much horizontal space, such as when using widescreen view and looking at a package description page (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.2):
- Made some major improvements to the user interface of the System Settings Emoticons page (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- Discover’s Updates page now has improved display for the number of updates in the header on top (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- We now have beautiful new icons for Suspend, Hibernate, and Switch User, among others (Krešimir Čohar, KDE Frameworks 5.56):
- We have a nice new video camera icon, which will soon start showing up in various places (Rafael Brandmaier and Krešimir Čohar , KDE Frameworks 5.56):
- When a Kirigami app has a toolbar button that opens a dropdown menu when clicked, the menu no longer shows a tooltip if hovered over while the menu itself is visible (Aleix Pol Gonzales, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
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 
Could you please implement the ‘don’t wrap around’ option for default task manager as you did for virtual desktops earlier? Or like it implemented for dolphin’s tabs, that full scroll takes you to the first or last tab. I often switching windows by placing a cursor on task manager and scrolling and it’s always sad when you missing needed window.
LikeLike
Not a bad idea. Please file a bug!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Done: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404781 Hope it won’t take a long time to implement. Thank you in advance.
LikeLike
It’s amazing to see how kde improves day after day. Really thanks!
LikeLiked by 1 person
>The “Share to Imgur” feature available in many KDE apps now actually works
That’s not quite correct. Sharing worked before, e.g. in Spectacle, the issue that was fixed was that when using the Share FileItemActionPlugin there was no way of getting the URL
LikeLike
To my knowledge, Spectacle was the only app where it worked, but fair enough! I’ll update the text.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Did you know if the “share to pastebin” is working too? In dolphin it’s not working nowadays.
LikeLike
Sounds like a good bug to file!
LikeLiked by 1 person
It works to me, but there was a while it wasn’t. Have you the latest upgrade of the operating system using plasma?
LikeLike
It seems that a lot of work is going on spectacle these days, that’s very welcome!
Unfortunately it still falls short compared to the tools available on other platforms. One such “I can’t live without” feature is to automatically capture the window/area/widget underneath the cursor, and for the selection mode to automatically change from “window/area/widget under the cursor” to “rectangular selection” (the first video on https://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.html gives an idea).
In comparison, constantly juggling with spectacle’s rigid “one capture mode at a time” is exhausting.
Do you know if it’s possible/planned?
LikeLike
Not planned, but anything’s possible. 🙂 Those are some pretty nifty features though! Inline image annotation is planned though and the backend is currently under development.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hello Nate, great improvements again overall! Can you please take a look at Bug #400928 and #397252. These ones bother me everyday whenever I turn on my computer. 😦
LikeLike
My area of expertise is pretty far from that, so I’m just happy they don’t happen to me! Hopefully someone can figure them out.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on Mysiblog.
LikeLike
My compliments for the improvements. As of Spectacle, is it is possible to recall Spectacle by Stamp key when it is minimized? It should be much more productive instead of use the mouse to recall the spectacle window.
LikeLike
Yes, it’s one of the options I implemented. “Return focus to Spectacle”
LikeLike
Excellent.
LikeLike
Really great, as always Nate & KDE Community!!
I really feel like if Spectacle would receive some updates like Flameshot has, (basic image editing basically), it would be fantastic, of course, the updates mentioned today here are really fantastic to read about, and i am pretty sure they will make a much better screen capture software.
Thank you as every Sunday and week, to you Nate and the whole KDE Community that makes this amazing software possible.
Receive a huge hug mate ^^.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Good progress!
Is there some insight into the cause of this bug? https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387313
Looks like investigation hit some roadblock, and it remains one of the most annoying bugs in KDE Wayland session.
LikeLike
Good week.
With luck Qt 5.12.1 breaking various themes like Oxygen / Air / Kvantum (many) will be fixed soon.
Causing massive plasmashell memory leaks all over the Arch based disrto-verse, only real workaround is to change temporarily to Breeze (or similar).
LikeLike
Sounds like you’re talking about https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-73691. Yep, I think it should be fixed soon, since a patch was just submitted today!
LikeLike
New report,
new spanish translation available!!
https://victorhckinthefreeworld.com/2019/02/25/mejorando-kde-en-facilidad-de-uso-y-productividad-semana-7-de-2019/
Greetings
LikeLiked by 2 people
Translation in portuguese!!
https://infopensusebr.wordpress.com/category/ambiente-de-trabalho/
LikeLiked by 2 people
As of KDe Neon, will it be upgrated to 18.04.02 release of Ubuntu? thanks.
LikeLike