Hot on the heels of last week, this week’s Usability & Productivity report continues to overflow with awesomeness. Quite a lot of work what you see featured here is already available to test out in the Plasma 5.16 beta, too! But why stop? Here’s more:
New Features
- We now have full support for configuring touchpads using the Libinput driver on X11, including enabling or disabling horizontal scrolling (Atul Bisht, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- Plasma’s OpenConnect network plugin gained support for the GlobalProtect protocol in OpenConnect (Alejandro Valdes, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- In open/save dialogs, it’s now possible to drag-and-drop files to the main file list view to have the dialog quickly select that file (Méven Car, KDE Frameworks 5.59)
- Dolphin now has a bookmarks management system for people with way more frequently-accessed locations than can be easily managed with the Places panel (David Hallas, Dolphin 19.08.0):
Clearly I am not one of those people
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- Lots of bugfixes for the notification rewrite in Plasma 5.16: pop-ups are located correctly in multi-screen environments (Daniel Vrátil) and when using a vertical panel (Kai Uwe Broulik); the System Tray window closes when un-hiding a pop-up (Kai Uwe Broulik). And there’s more to come, too!
- The SDDM login screen theme downloader no longer crashes if you cancel out of the password dialog or decline to enter your password within 30 seconds (John Gehrig, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- Discover’s Featured page now displays ratings as soon as they’re loaded, rather than making you navigate away from it and then back again (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- On Wayland, it’s now possible to resize GTK headerbar windows from window edges (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- Pushed a fix for crashing QML apps on the unreleased Frameworks 5.59, which was biting Neon Dev Unstable users. This crash was traced to a Qt issue, but only recently recently exposed by the recent bugfix for horizontal scrollbar handle size calculation. Software is complex, man! (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.59)
- It’s now possible to drag-and-drop links that are more than 256 characters long from web browsers to the desktop (Chinmoy Ranjan Pradhan, KDE Framrworks 5.59)
- The Baloo file indexing system now ignores SQL database dumps, files relating to virtual machine disks, and 3D printing .gcode files (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.59)
- Dolphin no longer crashes when hiding a device in the Places Panel’s Devices category (David Hallas, Dolphin 19.08.0)
- Gwenview now displays vastly more EXIF metadata for RAW images (Tom Moebert, Gwenview 19.08.0)
User Interface Improvements
- Discover’s sidebar now looks like a regular desktop-style sidebar (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- All Plasma widgets’ configuration windows have been thoroughly modernized in design and technology, now using a centered style and the latest Qt and Kirigami APIs (me: Nate Graham, Filip Fila, Björn Feber, and Krešimir Čohar, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- Buttons in the login, lock, and logout screens now have a little animation when clicked (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- Dolphin’s Samba share creation interface now has more comprehensible wording, displays the correct status while installing, and the user interface controls properly enable and disable themselves depending on whether the folder is shared (me: Nate Graham, KDE Applications 19.04.2):
- When using inline renaming on a file in Dolphin, the Home and End keys now always jump to the beginning or end of the whole filename, rather than the beginning or end of the current line (Chinmoy Ranjan Pradhan, Dolphin 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!
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Adventures in Linux and KDE 
As always, happy to read all the improvements, especially samba ones. Can’t wait for the official Plasma 5.16 release :).
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Fantastic news as always, great new week.
Just one question, the revamp of the widgets settings is for Plasma 5.16 i suppose, cause it’s not specified as usually, i suppose this was just a little error. And another one, at the notifications bugfixes, the first link is blank, i mean, it doesn’t go anywhere.
Apart of that, as always, amazing work Nate and KDE Community, i can’t wait to the official release of Plasma 5.16.
Thank you very much as always to everyone mentioned above ^^.
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Thanks, fixed both issues!
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No comments ♡
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It wasn’t so long ago that Plasma got a fair amount of flak; some of it justified to my thinking. How times have changed!
As usual I’m gobsmacked by the impressive rate at which these improvements are landing. True attention to detail, true craftsmanship. Thanks to all involved. In my humble opinion you’re building the greatest desktop in existence.
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I’m very happy that you put it in those terms, because that’s exactly how I think about it too, and it’s my explicit goal.
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Another great week!
https://phabricator.kde.org/D14796
So, this again is going to be posponed right?
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Sigh, yes. 😦
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> On Wayland though, this is not easy to do, as libinput implicitly does not provide a way to disable Horizontal Scrolling.
>
> To achieve that we need to work on KWIN side such that it is possible to provide an option to disable it.
😞
Hoping for 5.17 then.
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Great work by the KDE community, as always! I’m so excited to test it out once it’s released, especially running Wayland on NVIDIA. It is going to be available in the 5.16 once it reaches stable, right? Thanks!
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Yep!
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That was incredible! Thank you guys for creating such a great desktop. Can’t wait to see KDE 5.16 !
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You’re very welcome!
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Nice to read about all the ongoing improvements as always!
Is there a chance that the paddings of the new notifications will be improved as you already proposed in https://phabricator.kde.org/D21134? I remember that earlier this year we had some improvements to the old notifications already (https://phabricator.kde.org/D17975), which I was very happy about at the time, I hope we will not regress again in this respect?
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It’ll get done eventually. We wanted to wait for the beta to collect more feedback.
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New report
New spanish translation:
https://victorhckinthefreeworld.com/2019/05/20/mejorando-kde-en-facilidad-de-uso-y-productividad-semana-19-de-2019/
Happy hacking!
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The new libinput touchpad controls are amazing! Finally I can enable tap to click but disable tag and drag (and drag lock) without leaving the normal settings.
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Hello!
First of all thanks for the amazing work! Plasma is getting amazingly better every week! I got one questing, are there any news when/if wayland session will allow us to have fractional scaling in our screen (or per screen scaling on Xorg). I’m getting a really hard time in order to get me dual monitor setup working correctly. (1.5 scale on my laptop screen, 1 on my external monitor)
Thanks again!
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I know it’s on the to-do list!
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it’s very frustrating don’t have fractional scaling per monitor in KDE Plasma, Windows and Gnome are able to do this, but it seems Plasma is ignoring this each release.
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We already have per-monitor scaling on Wayland; all that’s needed is to implement fractional scaling on Wayland, which is planned and in progress.
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