After a somewhat light week, we’ve back with week 79 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative, and there’s a ton of cool stuff for you!
New Features
- The popular Picture of the Day wallpaper plugin can now pull images from Unsplash.com (Yunhe Guo, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
- Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps like KDevelop can now insert a non-indented newline with the ctrl + enter/return keystroke (Ahmad Samir, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- The kstart5 command (e.g. kstart5 dolphin) now works on Wayland (Igor Kovalenko, KDE Plasma 5.16.3)
- The ubiquitous translucent blur effect no longer looks too dark with certain Intel graphics hardware (Fredrik Höglund, KDE Plasma 5.16.3)
- The System Settings Fonts page’s “Force Fonts DPI” setting now works again (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
- Eliminated screen flickering at boot-up when using high DPI scaling (Aleix pol Gonzales, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- The “Go to line” feature in kate and other text editors that use the KTextEditor framework once again always centers the zoomed-to line, even if it’s at the end of the document (Christoph Cullman, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
- The “collapse all” icons used in many apps now correctly change their colors when using a dark theme (Natsumi Higa, KDE Frameworks 5.60)
- Gwenview now correctly loads and displays files located on remote locations accessed using KIO (Tom Moebert, Gwenview 19.08.0)
- Fixed an issue causing Konsole to randomly scroll down at times, especially for i3 users (Martin Tobias Holmedahl Sandsmark, Konsole 19.08.0)
- Konsole no longer eats the shift+backtab keystroke, so for example it’s once again possible to see history when using default zsh keybindings (and you can fix it for yourself right now by removing the Shift+Tab shortcut for “Next View Container” in Settings → Configure shortcuts) (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.08.0)
- Kate’s “Quick Open” feature once again sorts items by recency of use and pre-selects the top item (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 19.08.0)
- Kate’s “recent documents” feature now works when the current configuration is set up not to save individual windows’ settingsnow works when the current configuration is set up not to save individual windows’ settings (Ahmad Samir, Kate 19.08.0)
User Interface Improvements
- On Wayland, the user-configured keyboard repeat rate is now respected (Sam Edwards, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
- When a mounted device is ejected using the Device Notifier, the message telling you it’s safe to unplug an unmounted device now remains visible for a little while instead of immediately disappearing (Stefan Brüns, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- When there are no speakers or other audio output devices, Plasma now represents this by actually telling you that instead of creating a fake “Dummy output” device that can’t be interacted with (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
- Discover’s “Updates are available” notification is now persistent for greater visibility, and no longer clutters up your notification history after you’ve dismissed it or installed the updates (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- It’s now possible to set a global keyboard shortcut to turn Night Color on or off (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- Konsole’s settings window has received a user interface overhaul, and now follows the common FormLayout style (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.08.0):
- Spectacle’s “on click” trigger now works on Wayland (David Redondo, Spectacle 19.08.0)
- Yakuake now offers blurred backgrounds, just like Konsole (Owen Chia, 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 tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Loads of cool stuffs as always!
That Unsplash automatic wallpaper is so nice! Unsplash photos are high quality and cool!
Thank you guys!
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Thank you!
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Which are the native wayland programs until now?
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I think you already asked this same question two weeks ago: https://pointieststick.com/2019/06/29/kde-usability-productivity-week-77/comment-page-1/#comment-5755
I don’t have a detailed answer because I’m not an expert regarding the Wayland transition. You seem very interested in it, which is great! I would encourage you to seek out and learn this information so that you can become the Wayland transition subject matter expert! 🙂
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Question is different. In that post I have asked about the progress of wayland transition of the several programs that I ignore, in this one, I ask you about the specific programs which are natively developed in wayland. If you don’t know which programs are natively developed in wayland, how can you affirm that the progress is good? So you have lied to me, to the other viewers and to the KDe users too. If I say that you are a liar it’s not an offence…. it’s the truth and the truth is never an offence.
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If I had to know 100% of everything to make a statement on its general progress, then I guess every statement I’ve ever made would be a lie. Probably you too! Oops, I guess we’re all liars.
It’s very rude to call people liars. It’s even ruder to do it in their own house (digitally speaking). And doing it on the basis of false pedantry is just silly.
I’m afraid I will have to delete future rude comments. Both of our time is too valuable to spend arguing over things. Since you’re clearly very interested in Wayland, my advice is to spend that time learning more about the Wayland transition so you can answer your own questions for yourself.
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Hi Nate! You are doing great job! Ignore those trolls 🙂 I’m pretty sure you are not a liar!
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> Picture of the Day wallpaper plugin
I have a quick request, can you make it screen-rotation aware? i use a 90° tilted screen and sometimes the picture are looking very ugly. I would be fine if it would not change picture every day as long as it looks good.
Also looks like sometimes the picture are in 4k (or maybe better) so they still look good as the resolution is 1080p
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What’s the problem with a rotated screen? Might make the most sense to file a bug.
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Nice improvements, as every week.
I’ve been testing a few of Wayland session at Plasma 5.16.3, the improvement from Plasma 5.12/5.13 i think it was when i tested it at the past, it’s very obvious, and it’s to be thanked. You’re putting a huge work to make it work, so i only can be thankful.
Still i detected some bugs, of course, i will try to help within my possibilities, opening bugs, because i really think that’s the course of action, the way to notify the KDE developers.
But i really feel it much faster than Xorg, so i will try to use it often, to test it more deeply.
As always, thank you very much to all and specially to Nate for your hard work and to allow us to enjoy all this magnificent software.
A huge hug to everyone mentioned above ^^.
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That’s the reason to switch to wayalnd the sooner possible as well as the development of native wayland based programs because xwayland is the other name of xorg.
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great stuff!! as always in KDE!
Translated to Spanish to spread the word:
https://victorhckinthefreeworld.com/2019/07/15/mejorando-kde-en-facilidad-de-uso-y-productividad-semana-27-de-2019/
Happy hacking!
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Hi Nate,
> Konsole’s settings window has received a user interface overhaul, and now follows the common FormLayout style (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.08.0):
I’m not sure what FormLayout is. When I first saw this, I thought that Konsole settings dialog got migrated to QML+Kirigami, but that is not true. You probably meant that the dialog now looks like **if it was** designed with Kirigami’s FormLayout?
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Kirigami isn’t the only widget toolkit that has Form Layouts; it’s a generic term for a centered layout where the controls have left-aligned labels. Konsole’s overhauled settings window simply uses the QWidgets equivalent: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qformlayout.html. Same with Dolphin, Gwenview, Spectacle, etc.
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