Week 73 in Usability & Productivity initiative is here! We have all sorts of cool stuff to announce, and eagle-eyed readers will see bits and pieces of Plasma 5.16’s new wallpaper “Ice Cold” in the background!
New Features
- Kate now has a menu item with standard keyboard shortcut (ctrl+0) to reset the font size to the default value (Kishore Gopalakrishnan, KDE Frameworks 5.59)
- On X11, when Dolphin is already running and another app asks it to display some folder, it now opens a new tab to show that folder rather than creating a whole new window (Alexander Saoutkin, Dolphin 19.08.0)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- Spectacle can now take fullscreen screenshots on 4k screens (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE plasma 5.12.9)
- The Home button in Discover’s toolbar now activates on click-and-release, not on click (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.16.0)
- More fixes and polish for the upcoming Notifications rewrite in Plasma 5.16: The Panel no longer shows a blue icon when there are active notifications on the screen; KDE Connect notifications are now configurable; notifications from the Snap version of the Discord app now appear properly; when plugging in the mouse is configured to disable the touchpad, the notification shown when this happens now removes itself when the mouse is unplugged; apps that send multiple notifications but don’t tell Plasma their app IDs are now correctly grouped in the history; “Show even in Do Not Disturb Mode” now works for Spectacle; play/pause/more info buttons in file transfer notifications now have better spacing; and consecutive identical notifications are no longer discarded, which was causing various issues (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.0
- Kate and other KTexteditor-based apps no longer reset the syntax highlighting method when saving remote files using the sftp:// or fish:// protocol (Nibaldo Gonzalez, KDE Frameworks 5.59)
- Horizontal separators in Kirigami and QML-based user interfaces now have an equal amount of space above and below them (Marco Martin and Filip Fila, KDE Frameworks 5.59):
- Kate’s “Quick Open” feature once again has the top item selected by default (Michal Humpula, Kate 19.08.0)
- Akonadi-using apps like KMail can now automatically and silently recover from the dreaded “Multiple Merge Candidates” error (Daniel Vrátil, KDE Applications 19.08.0)
User Interface Improvements
- The System Settings page to configure Baloo now has an improved user interface (Kishore Gopalakrishnan, KDE Plasma 5.16.0):
- Huge improvements for font display: slight RGB hinting is now the default, Plasma no longer overrides distro font rendering defaults, and also the font settings page in System Settings now displays the actual value instead of a confusing “Vendor Default” label (Bhushan Shah and Julian Wolff, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- Menus and combobox pop-ups in QML-and Kirigami-based apps no longer animate their highlight effects when hovered over, bringing them into visual consistency with their QWidgets equivalents (Björn Feber, KDE Frameworks 5.59)
- When you use Kate or other KTextEditor-based apps to save over another file, they now delegate the confirmation prompt to the file dialog itself, so there’s never a double prompt or an overwrite without confirmation (Méven Car, KDE Frameworks 5.59
- When using the Breeze Light or Dark themes, the panel now reads accent, highlight, and hover colors from the active color scheme rather than using hardcoded colors (Noah Davis, KDE Frameworks 5.59):
- File metadata in decimal form now limits the decimals to three significant figures for readability (Alexander Stippich, KDE Frameworks 5.59)
- Kolourpaint now uses a better icon when using a dark theme (Noah Davis, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
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 
Another awesome week…. I know 5.16 is in Kubuntu Testing branch, but when 5.16 is official will it eventually be moved to the regular Kubuntu Disco backports ppa too ?
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Presumably, but that would be a question for Kubuntu’s packagers.
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Kubuntu’s packagers traditionally are very brake guys.
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Thank you guys! Nice new features! The new Plasma wallpaper also is a nice touch!
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I know, I just love it!
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Another fantastic week again.
Really close the official release of Plasma 5.16, i can’t wait anymore.
It really looks fantastic.
Thank you very much Nate and everyone who make this amazing software possible.
Bests to all mentioned above ^^.
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I know, right!? This release is a huge deal IMO. So much great stuff in it.
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Kde is fantastic I use it as my main desktop since forever. However, some paper cuts exist for the average user: better samba share integration is needed. The install and remove of another language (locale) will break things (plus, no remove option), wallpaper should be moved in a kde folder if set ( problem setting a wallpaper from usb, or a partition that is not yet mounted) just to name a few.
But , one of the most annoying one is that i cannot move tray icons.(maybe a drag and drop like in windows).
Other than that, i would say it`s perfect. keep up the good work!
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Agreed. All of those issues are on my radar screen. I’m actively working on Samba improvements myself as I recently made myself the maintainer of the Samba share creation UI. Other related work is also progressing. Language stuff is also actively in progress. The wallpaper issue you bring up is known and tracked by https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=408223. DnD tray icons is something that would be considered with a sufficiently robust patch, which unfortunately has yet to materialize, presumably because the code is rather challenging.
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Hoping that this bug in kwin will be adressed soon…
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=385522
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Me too. Unfortunately it’s more a political issue than a technical issue.
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Yeah, considering how configurable KDE is, its very strange that a simple thing like this can’t be easily controlled by users.
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– Now Dolphin opens a new tab instead of another entire instance –
Ahh fantastic, I’ve wanted for a long time this issue was fixed. Thank you so much guys, you’re awesome!!
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Is this one configurable? I’ve never used tabs in dolphion before, and don’t know what I like better…
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After discovering bugs and taking into account feedback, we will probably be making the behavior it configurable.
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I understand that there are probably lots of requests like this with any change you make, and therefore you can’t always make it configurable, so I appreciate a lot that you are considering it based on feedback. I hope you have a great week!
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Thanks, you too!
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Is it possible to add the balloons where to write thoughts on Kolourpaint?
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File a bug report requesting it! 🙂
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Thanks, Nate. I’ve already file the report long time ago. I hope in the right section. It is not always simple to guess the right section where to address suggestions or bugs.
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What’s the URL for your bug? Maybe I can help direct it.
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Which are the native wayland programs currently available on Kde? thanks.
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Nate, what about old bugs under wayland session:
1) a strange switching keyboard layout icon in a tray instead of appropriate chosen in settings;
2) yakuake window always appears in a background of kickoff panel when the panel situated at the top of the screen.
Those bugs is very old an is very annoying. It would be great if they would be fixed at last.
Thanks.
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another great work done by the community.
another great report
and another spanish trasnlation to help spread the word about both above:
https://victorhckinthefreeworld.com/2019/06/03/mejorando-kde-en-facilidad-de-uso-y-productividad-semana-21-de-2019/
‘ve phun!!
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A bit offtopic, what I’ve noticed, is that on oxygen theme the shadows are broken when using 2x display scaling. Same goes for window decoration/app view gradient, it seems that kwin doesn’t really scale to hidpi. Are there any plans to address these issues?
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That would be a bug in Oxygen, not KWin. I imagine it’ll get fixed only if someone who really loves Oxygen wants to fix it. I generally focus on the default Breeze theme.
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Dear Nate, how do you think about this visual issue?
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=408209
All the best
Eric
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That’s the GNOME file dialog, not the KDE file dialog. We don’t have any power over it. 🙂 You’d have to report it to them.
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Hello.
I’m sorry if this text doesn’t make as much sense as I’d like. It takes me a long time to write in English and I have used the Deepl translator.
If any Baloo developer reads this:
1. When I spike a removable disk Baloo doesn’t seem to recognize it automatically and when I do a search it doesn’t show me results with information about said disk. I have to restart Baloo, with “balooctl restart”.
2. Could you make the indexing engine use all the threads of the processor? I have a processor with 8 cores and 16 threads but when after “balooctl restart” Baloo starts to recognize my files from the external disk (USB 3, approx. 150 MB/sec in read) it pulls about 20 minutes and Ksysguard shows that the process is only using one thread. I guess that’s why it takes so long and if I used all 16 threads the process would take just over a minute (Baloo’s database is on a 3 GB/sec NVME write drive…).
3. Once Baloo has been restarted and examined the contents of my USB disk, the results referring to the files of said disk appear again but instead disappear results from my “home” folder that appeared before. All of them should appear.
Sorry to use this blog to report bugs, but as I say it is very hard to write in English with relative correction and therefore I have never opened a bugs.kde.org account, which I know is the right place for this.
Greetings.
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As you say, the correct place to report this is on bugs.kde.org. 🙂 Don’t worry about your English, this was perfectly comprehensible! Please file one bug per issue. Thank you!
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