Here’s week 86 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! There are lots and lots of cool changes, which is especially impressive as the KDE community prepares for Akademy, which kicks off next weekend. Sadly I cannot attend this year–there was an unavoidable scheduling conflict with my best friend’s wedding–but I will be there in spirit! In the meantime, check out the progress:
New Features
- Krunner’s unit conversion feature can now convert decibel units (Ismael Asensio, KDE Frameworks 5.62)
- Spectacle can now be configured to automatically save screenshots right after they’re taken (Antonio Prcela, Spectacle 19.12.0):
- There’s a new “Recently used” feature, accessible by navigating to recentlyused:/ in Dolphin or the file dialogs. This new one uses the same data source as Activities and the application launcher menus (e.g. Kicker, Kickoff, dashboard) and will be made visible in Dolphin and the file dialogs by default soon! (Méven Car, KDE Applications 19.12.0)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- Discover once again shows app reviews (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.16.5)
- Discover’s Update Notifier is no longer capable of crashing Plasma (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- Discover’s review dialog no longer allows its contents to visually overflow when logged in as a user with a very long username (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- Window decoration buttons in GTK3 headerbar windows are now colored correctly no matter what KDE color scheme is being used (Carson Black, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- System Tray icons that come from Wine apps now display their context menus properly when right-clicked (Konrad Materka, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- Changing color schemes is now faster and less visually jarring (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- The Info Center’s Energy page now shows battery icons properly when using a dark Plasma theme and a light icon theme, and the battery display has received a minor visual overhaul in the process (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
- Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps now strip off Windows-style newlines from pasted text (Christoph Cullmann, KDE Frameworks 5.62)
- Dolphin no longer attempts to store view properties on network shares, preventing one possible way for a slow network share to hang your machine (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 19.12.0)
- Kirigami ToolButtons that open menus when clicked now restore the correct background color when the menu is closed (Arjen Hiemstra, KDE Frameworks 5.62)
- Fixed a common crash in the Baloo file indexing service (Tomaz Canabrava, KDE Frameworks 5.62)
- Dolphin’s “show split view in new windows” feature works properly again (Alexander Saoutkin, Dolphin 19.08.1)
- Konsole’s “show new tab button” option is back again (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.08.1)
User Interface Improvements
- The System Settings “Multimedia” group and the confusing old Phonon page are no more! Instead the much more useful and user-friendly Audio page has been promoted to the top level, and the functionality left in the old Phonon page is still available if needed via the phononsettings app. This allows the “Automatically switch all running streams when a new output becomes available” feature to work (Harald Sitter and Nicolas Fella, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
- The new “capacity degradation” text was not well-received and still caused confusion, so it’s now been restored to its original scale and renamed to the hopefully much clearer term “Battery Health” (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- The Plasma notification pop-ups now appear a little bit farther away from window edges so they don’t obscure apps’ titlebars and user interface elements at the bottom of the window (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- The System Settings Activities page has received a user interface overhaul for improved consistency and visual appeal (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
I know the apps don’t all have icons; we’re working on that - KRunner now shows visually when it is still searching for results (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- Checkboxes and radio buttons in GTK 3 apps now color themselves appropriately to respect your color scheme when using the Breeze GTK theme (Carson Black, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- Dolphin’s default toolbar layout has been adjusted to be more useful and visually pleasing (Simon Krull, Dolphin 19.12.0):
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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