If you’re celebrating Easter, we’ve got a gift for you: week 67 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! And if not… well you get it anyway!
New Features
- The KWin window manager now has initial support for using the proprietary NVIDIA driver in a Wayland session (Erik Kurzinger, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- System Settings pages written in QML that are opened standalone now have the correct window height by default. This fixes the Fonts, Workspace Behavior, Mouse, Touchpad, and Launch Feedback pages (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.58):
- Fixed a common Plasma crash (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- Kate and other tabbed editors using the KTextEditor framework no longer display the dreaded “ambiguous shortcut” warning dialog when switching tabs with the ctrl+page up/page down keyboard shortcuts because the “move insertion point to top/bottom of viewport” shortcuts have been changed to be alt+home/end (Cnristoph Cullman, KDE Frameworks 5.58)
- Fuel consumption conversion in KRunner now produces the correct results (Michal Malý, KDE Frameworks 5.58)
- Fixed a regression in dolphin that was preventing the “Create New” button from being added to the toolbar (me: Nate Graham, and Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Applications 19.04.1)
- Mobile phones plugged into your computer no longer show two identical “Open with File Manager” items in the Device Notifier (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 19.08.0):
User Interface Improvements
- It’s now possible to replace a widget with an alternative one when in panel edit mode (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- Discover now lets you force-quit it if you try to quit while it’s doing stuff–of course, it’s up to you to live with the consequences! (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- The Login Screen (SDDM) System Settings page got a visual overhaul (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- It’s no longer necessary to check the “Force Rasterization” checkbox in Okular’s print settings to enable the page scaling options (Michael Weghorn, KDE Applications 19.08.0)
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 
a new awesome report!
And translated to Spanish to spread the word:
– https://victorhckinthefreeworld.com/2019/04/21/mejorando-kde-en-facilidad-de-uso-y-productividad-semana-15-de-2019/
Thanks to KDE community!!
Happy hacking!!
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Very nice stuff. As always, thank you guys!
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“Kate and other tabbed editors using the KTextEditor framework no longer display the dreaded “ambiguous shortcut” warning dialog when switching tabs with the ctrl+page up/page down keyboard shortcuts because the “move to top/bottom of view” shortcuts have been changed to alt+home/end (Cnristoph Cullman, KDE Frameworks 5.58)”
Won’t this confuse people that are used to using Ctrl+Home/End to jump to the top/bottom of documents?
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Until they learn the new shortcuts, yes. While every shortcut change is bound to inconvenience someone, sometimes it’s deemed worth it. This was one of those times, because it allowed us to let Kate and other apps use the consistent KDE tab switching shortcuts.
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OK.
I just realized I wasn’t aware there is a difference between “Move to Beginning/End of Document” and “Move to Top/Bottom of View”. NOW it makes sense to me. Thank you.
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Ah, you beat me to it 🙂
And I changed the shortcuts and confirmed the behaviour.
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but this “move to top/bottom of view” is moving the cursor inside the screen only, not moving the content you see like if you do page up/down, right?
And I don’t think Sprocket’s behaviour should be affected, as he mentioned Ctrl, not Alt as a modifier for Home/End.
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That’s correct!
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Would it make sense to have a + and – butttons next to each font setting to quickly change font sizes?
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Great work!
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Wayland support on nvidia! Yay!
Let’s add wayland protocol for global menus and I’m ready to move in 😉
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A quick follow up to this comment. How can I try this right now? Can I just compile kwin by itself or do I have to wait for 5.16?
Awesome work!!
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Yeah, you can compile KWin yourself right now if you want!
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Hope this one had a generic cause that was fixed in one place because there are additional places where this behavior exists
System Settings pages written in QML that are opened standalone now have the correct window height by default. This fixes the Fonts, Workspace Behavior, Mouse, Touchpad, and Launch Feedback pages (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.58)
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Yes, it was a generic fix that affected all of them. Which other pages do you see the problem on? The remaining problems I’m aware of are in QWidgets KCMs, not QML ones.
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For instance `Energy Information`
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This one is current;y in the process of being fixed to use the new code that automatically yields a correct default window size: https://phabricator.kde.org/D20598
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As well as “Activity Setting”
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This KCM is not written in QML, so it doesn’t get the fix automatically.
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Hello Nate, pleasure, I was thinking this long ago, you could pick up the “panel customization features” (which increases width and height etc …) and put in “System Settings” thinking about beginners. You can only customize the plasma panel on the desktop by entering “System Settings”. I think it would look great! Thank
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I don’t think that would work, because you can add multiple panels to a single screen or activity, and each screen or activity can have its own panel. It’s much saner to have the configuration interface for each panel be tied to that panel.
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I understand, thank you.
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Still no right mouse click emulation. No on-screen keyboard on X and no resizing for keyboard on Wayland. Still hard to use without tweaks on some touchscreen-only devices.
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But everything else is Awesome.
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Yeah, we’re discussing some of these things presently.
Note that the Wayland session is becoming better and better all the time. 🙂
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Another great week/sunday at the KDE Community.
Plasma 5.16 looks pretty nice.
I would really love to move to Wayland session, but the last two times i tried, i only got frustrated, (Telegram Desktop with generic Wayland icon, really horrible performance at simple tasks as move the same Telegram Web window), i really hope Plasma 5.16 will be a nice step forward at usability of Wayland session under Plasma.
As always, great work Nate and all the KDE Community.
All of you really rock!!
Thank you everyone for your great efforts.
Bests to all mentioned above ^^.
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Man, with all these new fixes I wish I was using a rolling distro like Tumbleweed! But just the thought of migrating all my data is painful.
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Hi Nat. I would ask if it would be possible to upgrade the kernel of KDe Neon to the 4.18 release, such as Ubuntu LTs has done, since the 5.16 PLASMA release.
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