Week 62 for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative is here, and we didn’t let up! We’ve got new features, bugfixes, more icons… we’ve got everything! Take a look:
New Features
- The System Settings Desktop Session page now lets you reboot directly into the computer’s UEFI setup screen, if applicable (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- Gwenview now has full touchscreen support, with gestures for swiping, zooming, panning, etc. (Steffen Hartlieb, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
- Okular’s presentation mode now allows you to optionally navigate both backwards and forwards using a touchscreen (Oliver Sander, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- When using multiple Virtual Desktops, Task Manager tooltips once again indicate the Virtual Desktop that a task is on, and sorting tasks by Virtual Desktop once again works (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
- Fixed a bug that could cause certain GTK themes to display huge icons in the System Settings GTK configuration page (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
- KInfoCenter once again activates list items with a single-click even when using the systemwide double-click mode for files and icons (Harald Sitter, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
- When when using X11 and the KWin window manager’s compositing is interrupted or stopped in the middle of the Present Windows effect, mouse and keyboard input no longer get disabled (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
- In the Application Dashboard, Ctrl+a now selects all search text even after the context switches (Eike Hein, KDE Plasma 5.15.3)
- Discover no longer lets you pull down on the updates page to refresh while it’s already refreshing (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.4)
- Discover once again displays the proper background colors on the app list, search, and updates pages (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.4)
- The login and lock screens’ clock no longer sometimes displays some of the numbers clipped off at the sides (Krešimir Čohar, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- The qtquick2 style framework is now listed as a runtime dependency for Plasma, which should hopefully provide a helpful hint to packagers that it needs to be installed and reduce the incidence of people who use certain distros seeing ugly user interfaces on QML/Kirigami apps (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- The Baloo file indexing service should now crash much less often (Valeriy Malov, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
- When a move or copy operation is canceled in the middle, the half-finished destination file is now automatically deleted (Chinmoy Ranjan Pradhan, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
- Fixed another memory leak in Dolphin (David Hallas, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
- Dolphin’s Information Panel’s context menu is now correctly positioned on Wayland when using two screens (Méven Car, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
- When downloading new Yakuake skins from the Get Hot New Stuff window, the newly-downloaded skins actually appear as options you can choose (Lionel Chauvin, Yakuake 3.0.6)
User Interface Improvements
- Discover’s update notifier no longer opens a little pop-up when you click on it; now it just opens Discover itself, which fixes problems with the notifier and the app disagreeing over how many updates are available (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- Cleaned up and re-organized the Task Manager context menus (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- Task Manager tooltips that display album art now look much better (Tranter Madi, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- When using a vertical panel, the Digital Clock’s date display now takes up the full amount of available horizontal space (Antny Zilla, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- In Kate, KWrite and other apps like KDevelop that use the KTextEditor framework, text selection now works like it does everywhere else: when text is selected, the left arrow key moves the insertion point one character to the left of the beginning of the selection, and the right arrow key moves the insertion point one character to the right of the end of the selection (Loh Tar, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
- In Kate, KWrite and other apps like KDevelop that use the KTextEditor framework, text drag-and-dropped onto the left border inserts it at the beginning of the line (Loh Tar, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
- Various icons throughout KDE software such as in Dolphin and System Settings now look better when using a fractional systemwide scale factor (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.57)
- The Breeze applications-gaming icon is now visible against dark background, and just looks better in general (Noah Davis, KDE Frameworks 5.57):
- KIO and Dolphin now display thumbnails for PCX files (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Applications 19.04.0)
- Spectacle’s filename template chooser now has clickable tokens (David Redondo, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
- The “Find” action in Yakuake, the embedded terminal in Dolphin and Kate, and any other users of the Konsole KPart now has a keyboard shortcut by default (Nicolas Fella, Yakuake 3.0.6)
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 
Translate for portuguese: https://debianopen.wordpress.com/2019/03/16/usabilidade-e-produtividade-semana-10-2019-kde/
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Great progress as always, glad to see more fixes to Baloo.
Is there any interest in switching to GDM over SDDM, or making SDDM more secure? Right now SDDM is among the weakest parts of an otherwise very solid desktop. For example SDDM runs X as root and GDM does not, and the SDDM developers have no plans to change this [1]. SDDM also is not aware of monitor layout configurations that Plasma has made, leading to screens being completely unaligned at initial login.
[1] https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/246
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GDM is a GNOME-specific project, and I don’t see that happening. Regarding SDDM, the solution is to fix those bugs, not switch to something else. 🙂
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I agree, which is why I wrote “or making SDDM more secure”. But the problem is that SDDM devs are not fixing those bugs, they’ve been open for years without progress. Right now the Plasma team is putting users at risk by recommending a login manager that runs X as root.
Plasma 5 is an amazing desktop, and a big part of that is how active, responsive, and caring the developers (such as yourself) are. Which is why SDDM stands in such stark contrast to the overall KDE/Plasma project.
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I wonder why they switched to SSDM, when lightdm works without problems.
If the intention is to use SDDM, use it when it is stable.
SDDM seems poorly developed.
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LightDM is an Ubuntu-specific project that has been abandoned by its own creators since Ubuntu moved to GDM as a part of their transition to GNOME. Though it’s speculation on my part, I imagine that fear of exactly something like this happening at some point is one of the reasons why the SDDM was started instead of using LightDM.
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Lightdm is not Ubuntu specific, although it is maintained by a Canonical employee, but is used on Linux Mint cinnamon (slick-greeter) and other projects.
Furthermore lightdm is still maintained, it has a 5-year LTS version:
“This is the first release in the stable 1.28 series. This series will be
maintained on the lightdm-1-28 branch and master will now be used for the
unstable 1.29 series.
Those users interested in new features are encouraged to update to lightdm
1.28 or remain on 1.26 which will be supported for longer. 1.28 will be
supported until April 2019 (nine months from now), the other release series
will expire on:
1.10 – April 2019
1.18 – April 2021
1.26 – July 2023”
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/lightdm/2018-August/001143.html
I don’t understand the concern of the duration of the project, it’s open source …
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/lightdm/2019-February/001152.html
https://github.com/linuxmint/slick-greeter
https://github.com/CanonicalLtd/lightdm
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You’re welcome to make a recommendation. 🙂
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Many times I had to give up using Kubuntu, for BUGs and missing SDDM features, bug reports but no response.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sddm/+bug/1816558
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That should have been reported to the SDDM people, not to Kubuntu. Here’s where: https://github.com/sddm/sddm
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Thanks for the improvements. The breeze dark theme no longer applies in LibreOffice.
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Please report bugs with the bug tracker. 🙂
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Also KHelpCenter got an updated interface: https://phabricator.kde.org/D19557 😀
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Ah, I missed that this had landed, sorry! I’ll mention it next week. 🙂
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Now, I’m one step closer to purge my Win partition.
Talking about Discover, i’ve seen that if there is an update in flatpak’s Freedesktop Platform it is shown as one update while it has, at least, 2 or 3 updates (VAAPI, html5 and the Platform itself) making inconsistencies in the number displayed by Discover an the number in the tooltip (last image in the ” fixes problems with the notifier and the app disagreeing over how many updates are available” link
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Please file a bug! 🙂
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Yay, more super important Baloo & Dolphin fixes (among many other useful improvements). Thanks again to all involved ! Time to renew my “Play the Game” subscription. BTW : about the “Play the game” campaign : members are not notified when they forget to renew their subscription !
cheers
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Yes, another great Sunday, thanks as every week Nate et al.
Plasma 5.16 really looks great.
Just updated yesterday to Qt 5.12.2 and affected by the Dark Breeze issue, but i read (i got answered on reddit, where i posted an entry talking about that), that the fix is already there, so i can fix it myself. The community always rocks!!
Bests Nate & the whole KDE Community, and thanks again for such an impressive and relentlessly work ^^.
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I’m happy to hear about baloo fixes. Some latest updates broke it. It was working fine for me for years and now journalctl shows constant baloo crashes. Hopefully, those recent fixes are targetting those. Or it can be something different. I don’t have time to look closer into it now. Crashes are reported in the journal but I don’t see them during system usage so this is not a priority right now.
It looks something like that (there is more but this is not the place to show it all) in case you are aware of it:
Process 1155 (baloo_file) of user 1000 dumped core.
Stack trace of thread 1741:
#0 0x00007fee5287577a n/a (liblmdb.so)
#1 0x00007fee52878c11 n/a (liblmdb.so)
#2 0x00007fee52878ef4 n/a (liblmdb.so)
#3 0x00007fee528795f5 n/a (liblmdb.so)
#4 0x00007fee52879c2f mdb_get (liblmdb.so)
#5 0x00007fee5432e7ee _ZN5Baloo8IdTreeDB3getEy (libKF5BalooEngine.so.5)
#6 0x00007fee5432a2f2 _ZNK5Baloo13DocumentUrlDB11getChildrenEy (libKF5BalooEngine.so.5)
#7 0x00007fee5434a12b _ZN5Baloo16WriteTransaction17removeRecursivelyEy (libKF5BalooEngine.so.5)
And few dozens of similar lines mentioning other libraries.
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I’ve also had the same overall experience that you used to have: that Baloo’s actually been reliable and well-behaved. Sorry to hear that is stopped recently.
Ordinarily I’d encourage you to file a bug, but in this case there’s no need; I can tell from the stack trace that it’s https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=390823
There’s a chance that Frameworks 5.57 will improve this situation.
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I hope 4.16 will bring the polkit to other dolphin features so I can move, copy and paste files properly without having to resort to the terminal. It’s time it gets resolved in my opinion
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Me too. I’m pushing for this in ways seen and unseen. 🙂
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Always nice to read about Baloo and fractional scaling work. Also:
“The System Settings Desktop Session page now lets you reboot directly into the computer’s UEFI setup screen, if applicable (”
Very cool idea, which I’m sure I’ll use quite a bit actually. Thanks as always!
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New report, new spanish translation:
https://victorhckinthefreeworld.com/2019/03/18/mejorando-kde-en-facilidad-de-uso-y-productividad-semana-10-de-2019/
Saludos!
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Hi Nate, is there a an overview of which parts of KDE already support fractional scaling (partly/completely) and which still don’t (at all)?
That could help to track the status of KDE supporting HiDPI. 🙂
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Not to my knowledge; we just fix bugs as they come in.
Full high DPI support when using an integer scale factor is pretty bulletproof except for Gwenview AFAIK; it’s only fractional scaling that still has a lot of user-visible glitches associated with it.
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