Somehow we’ve gone through 80 weeks of progress reports for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! Does that seem like a lot to you? Because it seems like a lot to me. Speaking of a lot, features are now pouring in for KDE’s Plasma 5.17 release, as well as Applications 19.08. Even more is lined up for Applications 19.12 too, which promises to be quite a release. Anyway, here’s what we’ve got for you:
New Features
- It’s now possible to see a network’s QR code for easy sharing with others (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
- It’s now possible to sync user settings for fonts, cursors, color schemes, etc. to the SDDM login screen, ensuring a unified look and feel from boot to shutdown (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- KRunner’s unit conversion abilities now include binary sizes like Megabytes and Gibibytes (Jonathan Rubenstein, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
- Okular now has an “Open Containing Folder” feature, so for example you can easily find the on-disk location of PDFs downloaded from the internet (me: Nate Graham, Okular 1.8.0):
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- It’s once again easily possible to close the Look And Feel preview window on systems using Qt 5.13 (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
- Fixed a recent regression that prevented documents located on remote servers from being opened using KIO’s command-line tools when the URL for the document contained a port number (Gleb Popov, KDE Plasma 5.16.4)
- Plasma no longer attempts to auto-mount already-mounted devices under certain circumstances (Méven Car, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- Comboboxes in QML-based software now close their open pop-ups when clicking on the combobox itself (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
- Spinboxes in QML-based software now display text that’s anti-aliased correctly and looks good with a fractional scale factor (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
- When dragging a rubber-band-selection in Dolphin, the selection box now goes away as expected after right-clicking (Jackson Reed McNeill, Dolphin 19.08.0)
- Okular’s page borders now look good in High DPI mode (Oliver Sander, Okular 1.8.0)
User Interface Improvements
- The spinning busy indicator animation now has arrows that point in the same direction as the rotation (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.61):
- Kate’s “switch input mode” keyboard shortcut is now bound to Ctrl+Alt+V by default, which makes it possible to use the standard Ctrl+Shift+V shortcut to paste text into Kate’s embedded terminal (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
- When spectacle has minimized itself during a timed screenshot, if you un-minimize it, the “Take a new Screenshot” button will have turned into a cancel button, which displays an inline progress bar showing how much time is left before the screenshot is taken (David Redondo, Spectacle 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 
Hi Nate! Again, thank you and other developers very much for your work. I see many improvements, that actually I wanted for some time. For example, I wanted that Open Containing folder in Okular.
May I ask you to see this: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196998
It is a feature request for dynamically wrapping of lines in Konsole. Implementing this will hugely help while hacking/development in kde. Also here https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=227&t=140633 one person said that he has programming skills and he is explicitly interested in this too.
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Yep, that’s my top Konsole wish too. I’ll talk to the Konsole developers to see if I can get a sense of how long it would take to do and what the technical challenges are.
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Great stuff (as always).
Why not to write an article like: “how to start improve KDE software for non programmers” in wich you can relate how did you start to contribute… Maybe can be a good start point for someone else…
Anyway, thanks for this reports (and on Monday will be available in Spanish in my blog) 🙂
happy hacking!
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That’s a very good idea! I think I will.
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🙂
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Well, another spanish translation for this reporter, to help spread the word about the great work done by KDE community!!
https://victorhckinthefreeworld.com/2019/07/22/mejorando-kde-en-facilidad-de-uso-y-productividad-semana-28-de-2019/
Happy hacking!
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Perfect.
Nate, this project come to my attention: kwin-lowlatency [1]. I’ve been testing it in Fedora 30 by using zawertun’s copr repository [2] (something like ubuntu ppa) that has fresh KDE build and also provides an kwin-lowlatency package.
I must say: the difference is huge. Too huge that I don’t want ever ever to come back. Is there any chance to take a look at this and include them in upstream? At this moment i just feel bad for the people that aren’t aware of kwin-lowlatency and are still running default kwin.
(Plus there’s the questionable plus of having _GTK_FRAME_EXTENTS built in! [3] that makes gnome applications and firefox look awesome!)
[1] kwin-lowlatency: https://github.com/tildearrow/kwin-lowlatency
[2] https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/zawertun/kde/
[3] https://github.com/ZaWertun/fedora-copr-kde5/issues/5
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Those are features I’d like too. I can talk to the KWin developers about it and see what happens.
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Thank you! 😀
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I second to that! I wished that by some magic that would have made it into 5.17, but i know it won`t. But boy, the kwin is faster with that patch!
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As always, amazing new stuff & huge work from your side.
I would like to say that Wayland has improved a lot since i tried it about 1 year ago. Now it’s more usable, not entirely usable yet, unfortunately, (i can’t use KMail, Spectacle as i wish, etc), but i know there’re people working on it, so i keep my hopes up.
Of course, i reported/filed as bugs everything i found. I really hope that on Plasma 5.17 & KDE Applications 19.08 will be fixed some of them and improved the experience, cause it’s more than obvious that it’s notably faster than Xorg, but there’s a lot of work to be done yet. But anyways, i know you’re working on it, so again, thank you very much for your terrific work.
I think i remember something about victorhck, the mate that commented the first on this post, about running KDE Plasma on a RasPi, if i remember correctly, flawlessly.
I’m thinking about buy 2 of the last model (Raspberry Pi 4), one of them for my parents, as a main “PC”, to run Arch Linux ARM, Plasma 5, KDE Applications, KDE Frameworks, Firefox & [LibreOffice], (pending of run an online office suite on a upcoming server i’ll be mounting in the really near future. I suppose then there’s no problem with running the mentioned software on the Raspberry Pi 4.
As always, thank you very much for your amazing work, efforts and everything.
Bests & receive a huge hug to everyone mentioned above ^^.
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You’re very welcome! It’s really nice to hear a concrete example of how our performance work has paid off. Using a RPi as a full productivity machine with Plasma is very impressive IMO!
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Regarding: It’s now possible to sync user settings for fonts, cursors, color schemes, etc. to the SDDM login screen, ensuring a unified look and feel from boot to shutdown (Filip Fila, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
I guess there may be a conflict when a computer has 2+ admin users and 2+ of them try to push to sddm their specific plasma settings…
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That’s why it’s currently a manual action rather than an automatic background process. In the future we may be able to extend it to sync settings automatically for the common case of only one admin user though.
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Do you have any plans for changing the default UI Noto font? Thanks!
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Personally I think the Ubuntu font is vastly superior and it’s what I use on my own machine, but there’s a very good reason for keeping Noto as the default: it has the widest range of glyphs of any font in existence. This makes it a truly universal font, suitable for every language. Given the diversity of KDE users, we’d like to keep this, so any font we might want to use instead of Noto has to meet this very high bar.
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Nate and all,
I am a middle-aged user who has been out of the tech industry for many years and I want to say ‘Thank you’ for making tech/linux/KDE fun! I am thrilled by the improvements that you all seem to be able to crank out every week.
Keep up the fabulous work!
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You’re very welcome! Technology should be fun. Somehow over the last 15 years we turned it into a dystopian nightmare, and I think that sucks. I think FOSS is a key part of returning power to the people, and KDE a key player in that initiative.
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I agree with Robert. Your blog is a great way of communicating with the community. I really enjoy seeing all the changes and work going on (even the ones that don’t affect my particular workflow)!
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> makes it possible to use the standard Ctrl+Shift+V shortcut to paste text into Kate’s embedded terminal (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.61)
YES!
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