In week 61 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative, the MVP has got to be the KDE community itself–all of you. You see, Spectacle has gotten a lot of work thanks to new contributors David Redondo and Nils Rother after I mentioned on Reddit a week ago that “a team of 2-4 developers could make Spectacle sparkle in a month“. I wasn’t expecting y’all to take it so literally! The KDE community continues to amaze. But there’s a lot more, too:
New Features
- On Wayland, the System Settings Libinput touchpad page now allows you to configure the click method, switching between “areas” or “clickfinger” (Atul Bisht, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- The slideshow wallpaper now displays the actual images that are inside the folders you’ve chosen (David Redondo, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- The System Settings Color page now has a search bar and filtering feature so for example you can show only light or dark themes (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- File overwrite operations now copy to a temporary file and then replace the destination file at the very end, so canceling an overwrite in the middle no longer destroys the destination file (Chinmoy Ranjan Pradhan, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
- Spectacle now has an optional setting for Rectangular Region mode to auto-accept the dragged box instead of allowing you to adjust it first and then accept (Nils Rother, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
- Spectacle now lets you change the level of compression for lossy image formats (Nils Rother, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- Spactacle’s “Capture the current pop-up only” feature now works again (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
- When using multiple virtual desktops and saved sessions, the last-used virtual desktop is now remembered and restored when you start up the session again (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
- On-screen displays showing volume level etc no longer jerkily flicker as they fade out when using Qt 5.12 ( Krešimir Čohar, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
- File open/save dialogs spawned by apps using the XDG portal (such as firefox) now look good when using a fractional scale factor (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
- Task switcher previews now look good when using a fractional scale factor (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- Fixed case where copying files could cause Dolphin to crash (David Hallas, KDE Frameworks 5.56)
- The grid items in many new-style System Settings pages now display content that is sharp and crisp rather than blurry (David Edmundson, KDE Frameworks 5.57):
- Symlinks to mounted NTFS disks are once again visible in Dolphin (Wolfgang Bauer, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
- The scrollable list-within-a-sheet present in the System Settings Languages page no longer escapes from the bounds of the parent view when scrolled (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.57):
- An erroneous overwrite warning dialog is no longer presented when using a case-sensitive filesystem and renaming an item by just changing its case (Robert Hoffman, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
- In KDE Neon and other distros that default to the Noto Sans font with Noto Symbols2 as a fallback for characters not present in Noto Sans, typing in the lock and login screens’ password field no longer causes the field to become slightly taller (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.57):
Next step is to use a different glyph for the black dot, since the one we’re using appears too high in the text field. For more information, see https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/issues/1468 - When using two screens, Spectacle’s help text in Rectangular Region mode now shows up in the middle of the primary display, rather than split between the screens (Nils Rother, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
- Konsole once again correctly displays the underline-style cursor (Wolfgang Bauer, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
User Interface Improvements
- The logout screen now clearly indicates which option is selected (KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- Discover’s sources menu now shows the version number for each different source for that app (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- It’s once again possible to disable the tooltips that show up when hovering over a window decoration button like Maximize, Minimize, Close, etc. (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- The Media Frame’s settings window was thoroughly updated and modernized (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- The Web Browser widget now has a bigger default expanded size and uses an icon that becomes monochrome at small panel heights (Ilya Ostapenko, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- Kate’s “search wrapped” message no longer appears right in the center of the view where it obscures the search result (Loh Tar, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
- When quitting, Kate no longer annoys you by prompting you to acknowledge files that were modified on disk by something other than you, such as a source control change (Loh Tar, KDE Applications 19.04.)
- Text file thumbnails now actually show syntax highlighting for the text inside the thumbnail (Friedrich Kossebau, 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 
Simply awesome! Thank you so much!
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Wow, congrats, tons of good stuff again !
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Isn’t the KDE community amazing?
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That’s a great photo in the Media Frane’s setting window.
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Thanks, that’s me and my son. 🙂
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Great!!!!!!
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Wow and wow again! I know I had said this before but this time the list is really full with very useful improvements. I can’t decide my favorites, there are too many of them.
However, what I noticed were those color mode filters: Why just two? There are three color modes:
light, dark and mixed one (called confusingly “darker”, so light content but dark panel, titlebar, frames, etc.). This is also popular and demanded color scheme.
And what is this media frame? Is it some new option? A widget/applet? I think I roughly get the idea but never saw such thing on Plasma. Pantheon jas something like that and YT videos can have pop-up windows with right extensions (like Iridium – I recommend it). It looks like it’s not a new thing and yet, I never saw it in default DE.
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The “mixed” style is accomplished by using a dark Plasma theme and a light color scheme (or vice versa), so there’s nothing the colors KCM could do to facilitate that I’m afraid.
Media Frame is a widget provided in the kdeplasma-addons package/repo, which is shipped by default with most distros. It’s basically a digital picture frame.
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Translate for portuguese:
https://debianopen.wordpress.com/2019/03/10/usabilidade-e-produtividade-semana-09-2019-kde/
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Caffilhobr, se voce esta traduzindo isso sempre, porque nao se junta ao povo do KDE Brasil, e colocamos seu blog no Planet KDE tambem?
Entra em contato comigo no telegram / email (tcanabrava@kde.org)
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Plasma 5 changed a lot since launched.. i really appreciate the new changes and fixes but they are still fixes.
The desktop eats a lot of RAM on idle state and tend to to do the same on CPU usage.
If I am developer.. I’d like to invest my time by fixing memory leaks rather than visual aspects.
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Please feel free to! We’re always happy to review performance improvement patches. Plasma is already quite lean compared to other offerings out there but lower resource consumption for the same level of performance is always better, of course. I’d recommend that you ask questions in the #plasma freenode IRC/Matrix channel or the plasma-devel@kde.org mailing list if you need any direction. Otherwise, just start submitting patches! I can’t wait to see what you come up with. 🙂
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Awesome stuff! Thank all of you guys.
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You’re very welcome!
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Nice work.
It’s nice to be focused on bugs fixes because it’s the weak point of KDE. In terms of functionality it’s so much ahead of the others DE
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Wow! Really great to see that this 13 year old nasty bug has finally been fixed! 🙂
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Hi nate, this is my first comment here and i would like to say that you are doing an awesome work .. so thanks you so much. But there is one thing that break usability imo..the scroll bar .. like you show on the picture above on top of the other components..it just look wrong.
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Yeah I’m not a huge fan of the overlay-style scrollbar either, but what’s worse IMO is the inconsistency. We’re aware of the issue and plan to fix it. See https://phabricator.kde.org/T9126
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New report,
new spanish translation to spread the word about the great work done by KDE community!!
https://victorhckinthefreeworld.com/2019/03/11/mejorando-kde-en-facilidad-de-uso-y-productividad-semana-9-de-2019/
‘ve phun!!
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Amazing as every Sunday & every week. Spectacle received a lot of love this past week, that is really nice. That really proves and shows that the visibility is really needed to find new developers, new people to add to the project, to improve it, to contribute to it, this community is amazing, for real. I always love to be part of it. I really hope i could be like you in the future Nate, to be able to dedicate myself entirely to this great world, do KDE software, and getting paid, being able to live from that.
Thank you to everyone for (again) another week of fantastic improvements at the KDE software, this just gets better and better every week, more and more desires to test it and have it on stable as soon as possible, the wait becomes really hard.
Bests Nate & everyone ^^.
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Thank you very much for your reportings and for your great job. Is it possible to take a look on this bug : https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=390424 ? For me it’s the last really annoying bug. I just opened an account added this commmentary : “After draging, sometimes the application isn’t launch, but each time after draging an application, the dashboard closes. So it’s necessary to re-open the dashoard to continue to reordering the favorites, it’s not at all practical in terms of behaviour.”
Best Nate
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Yeah I think I know a guy who might be able to fix that.
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Ah, thank you, you are great ! 🙂
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Hello Nate, since I have stumbled over Qimgv (https://github.com/easymodo/qimgv), I am wondering if you maby consider replacing Gwenview by Qimgv?
It works reliable and fast, offers HiDPI support, simple editing and works under Wayland. 🙂
It would be great if it were developed under the umbrella of KDE! 🙂
Kind Regards
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In general I’m not a fan of that kind of duplication. I suspect the deeper need that makes you want this to happen is Gwenview’s lack of HiDPI support. The solution there is clear: fix HiDPI support! Then the desire to replace it goes away. 🙂
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