Hold on to your hats, folks, because this week’s Usability & Productivity report is OVERFLOWING WITH AWESOMENESS! Let’s jump right in:
New Features
- The Plasma notifications system has been rewritten from the ground up, and now supports Do Not Disturb mode, persistent notifications, more intelligent history with grouping, critical notifications in fullscreen apps, improved notifications for file transfer jobs, better multi-monitor behavior, a much more usable System Settings page to configure everything, and more. Check out the commit, it’s truly epic! For even more information, see Kai’s blog post on the subject. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- Added support for one-time passwords for OpenConnect VPNs (Enrique Melendez, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- Dolphin and the Places panel in various apps and the open/save dialogs now display FUSE-mounted filesystems, including Plasma vaults (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.58):
- KTextEditor-based apps like Kate and KDevelop now have a radically better and more usable menu to choose syntax highlighting style which includes a built-in search (Nibaldo Gonzalez, KDE Frameworks 5.59):
- Spectacle’s Rectangular Region mode now works on Wayland! (Boudhayan Gupta, KDE Applications 19.08.0)
- Okular’s Line annotation can now have various visual flourishes added to the ends, allowing them to be turned into arrows and more! (Rajeesh K Nambiar, KDE Applications 19.08.0):
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- When muting all audio using a keyboard’s mute button, now the volume level notification sound is never played (Nicolas Fella, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- On X11, GTK headerbar windows now correctly change their titlebar color when inactive (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- The KWin window manager no longer crashes when a script removes the current virtual desktop (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- The “Connection Activated” notification no longer appears in the notification history, so as to avoid cluttering it up with un-actionable items (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- Horizontal scrollbars in Kirigami and QML-based apps now have a more accurate scroll handle width (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Frameworks 5.59):
- When Spectacle is configured to use a quality setting of greater than 89 for lossy image formats like JPEG, PNG images are no longer erroneously affected and are once again saved with reasonable file sizes (David Redondo, KDE Applications 19.04.1)
- When Spectacle is configured to save in a file format other than PNG, dragging the image from the main window to somewhere else now passes the other application an image in the appropriate alternative file type (me: Nate graham, KDE Applications 19.04.1)
User Interface Improvements
- When saving a file and there’s a file type chooser, its label now says “File type:” rather than “Filter:” (me, Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.59)
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 
Thanks for your efforts. As end-users, we appreciate it and we hope that the cooperation by our suggestions and feedback be useful to improve the object of the effort itself.
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Long life KDE!
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Has any test of PLASMA 5.16 enabling wayland when an Nvidia card is used, been done?
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Yes, but more is always appreciated! If you want to help, install KDE Neon Testing or Unstable edition, or another distro that provides pre-release builds.
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Many thanks. How can I forward feedback once I’ve installed the beta testing? Will Kde receive the pieces of information automatically?
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File bugs on https://bugs.kde.org like you normally do. We see them!
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Wow! Tons of improvements in notification area! I love that progress bar which is showing in notification box and indicates the download process. You guys are awesome! Thank you so much!
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I know, those are my favorite new features, too. They’re really slick.
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Link for New Notifications blog post is broken.
The right link is https://blog.broulik.de/2019/05/next-generation-plasma-notifications/
05 😉
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Oops, thanks, fixed now!
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An absolutely fantastic set of improvements! The only one I’m a little unhappy with – if I drag and drop, I assume a perfect copy of an image – not sure I like the potential for silent compression as I see dragging as something separate from saving.
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Spectacle’s drag-and-drop feature was always intended to be yet another way to save an image. If you want a lossless uncompressed image, simply make sure you have Spectacle configured to save in such a file format such as PNG, as it is by default.
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Another terrific week and Sunday to the KDE folks.
A huge revamp of the Notification system, really nice, Plasma 5.16 just gets better and better every week. It really pains me that the images of the Kai’s work can’t be seen, either here on WordPress.com or at the original pointstick domain. Please Nate, check it that out, because i tried to follow the link, but it looks like Kai deleted that post and redone on May, instead of April.
Thank you very much to Nate & everyone else who make all these tremendous software possible.
Bests to all mentioned above ^^.
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I’ve fixed the link, but the images show up just fine for me.
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Thanks!
Yes, i reloaded now to reply you and the images load nice now.
Everything fine now.
Bests Nate ^^.
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This looks really great, thank you!
Now the last usability showstopper for me is Global Menu not working on Wayland (this bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=385880). If that could be fixed, it would be great!
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great stuff! KDE community rocks!!
Spreading the word in spanish:
https://victorhckinthefreeworld.com/2019/05/13/mejorando-kde-en-facilidad-de-uso-y-productividad-semana-18-de-2019/
Happy hacking!
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