KDE Usability & Productivity: Week 82

Usability & Productivity 3 Minutes

I know I say this a lot… but it’s been yet another big week for KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! We also have major features in development–one of which I think will be very popular and I hope to be able to announce it next week. Until then, enjoy this week’s assortment:

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

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.

Published by Nate

Published

31 thoughts on “KDE Usability & Productivity: Week 82”

  1. This week’s changes and fixes are amazing! Thanks for working on multi-screen support, hope it will be possible to set external monitor as primary under Wayland soon.

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  2. It always amazes me how much work and details change or need to be improved/fixed every week. It constantly refreshes the appreciation of the Plasma and how much work went into it.
    Thanks!

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  3. I follow this report for a while now. And I have to say. Its an amazing idea. Not only do see people what’s happening within KDE and specificly things that influence users directly (not backend stuff), also
    the people who make these changes get appreciated 🙂

    So here it is: Thank you!

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    1. Pretty cool, right? And it’s all fully transparent so you can see how the changes were made. Makes it nice and easy to start contributing yourself. 🙂

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    2. That’s great news like every week! What definitely needs an overhaul in my opinion is the Breeze dark theme.

      Though I use it daily as it won’t make my eyes become tired as fast as with the bright theme, it lacks kind of contrasts and accents until I’d say, “wow, that looks awesome!”. 🙂

      Is it a topic for the design theme or is there a task defined?
      The bright Breeze theme has become pretty by now!

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    4. That article is super misleading. Nobody is creating a new desktop environment. What’s happening is that both KDE and GNOME developers are going to a conference to see how we both improve the state of developing Linux apps.

      Liked by 1 person

    5. Thank you for your clarification. I was doubtful about that article. Actually there are multiple websites that are post the same news.
      Thank you guys, and I hope this conference will help you make KDE better.

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  5. That’s great news like every week! What definitely needs an overhaul in my opinion is the Breeze dark theme.

    Though I use it daily as it won’t make my eyes become tired as fast as with the bright theme, it lacks kind of contrasts and accents until I’d say, “wow, that looks awesome!”. 🙂

    Is it a topic for the design theme or is there a task defined?
    The bright Breeze theme has become pretty by now!

    (answered to the wrong comment: next try)

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  6. HI Nate,

    Now that expanding spacers are available, do you think it’s time to look at standardising (as much as possible) toolbar appearance across applications? Example, always having the Control/Hamburger menu in the rightmost position, search always on it’s left etc.

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  8. The Memory size, part of the Hardware section seems wrong to me and it has been so for a long time.
    From what I know the JEDEC memory standards uses the binary size where kilo, mega, giga is a multiple of 1024 unlike the hard disk manufacturers and ISP that use the multiple of 1000 to trick people to think they have more than they really have.
    So when it comes to hardware, I would like to see the real hardware details / size, not how the software see it or what’s available after the kernel and whatever takes its part.
    In the picture above I assume that that computer has 8 GiB of RAM, but it’s displayed what is used or available.
    On my laptop with 8 GiB of RAM it shows 7.5 GiB of RAM, compared to Windows 7 that shows the read deal, 8 GiB of RAM.

    When it comes to the Processors part of the Hardware section I find it pretty confusing how it’s displayed.
    I would prefer much more to have the information displayed in a more logical order like.
    1. How many physical processors (sockets) are on the motherboard ?
    2. How many cores does each processor have ?
    3. How many threads does each processor have ?
    4. How big are the L1 / L2 / L 3 caches ?
    5. What is the current speed in MHz for the CPU and memory ?
    6. Bonus, maybe in a click to open detailed view window, display CPU available hardware instructions, SSE, AES….

    I don’t remember where I saw something like this, maybe Windows 8 / 10 task manager, but this really makes the most sense to me and I find it the easiest to understand how it’s the hardware.

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    1. Your computer probably has 8.000.000.000 Byte RAM, which is 7,5 GB (when using 1024 for the calculation). I guess Windows divides using 1000 and thus showing 8 GB.
      This explanation makes most sense to me.

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  9. Great. It would be wise to make a “More Details” button which opens KInfoCenter app. When sb opens System information it may expect to see all system info in one place.

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    1. I would like to do that but it’s a bit tricky. You’d need to hide the button in the KCM when it detects that it’s running in KInfoCenter already. And because a KCM can only be visible in one app at a time, the button would have to tell System Settings to navigate you to another page before opening KInfoCenter or else this would happen: https://i.imgur.com/GtctSz2.png

      These are solvable problems, but it’s just a bit tricky to puzzle through all the details.

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    2. Yeah, it is a bit tricky.

      Or to do sth to be able to show this config in both apps in the same time as it is read only “config” and the cause of not allowing it in both places in the same time does not exist. And then just focus KInfoCenter when it’s opened already.

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  10. Amazing work as every week Nate & everyone at KDE Community :).

    That Wayland improvements look pretty nice at Plasma 5.17.

    I can’t wait to see all the changes at Konsole 19.08, which is really close.

    Thank you very much as always to everyone who make this possible and especially to Nate.

    A huge hug to everyone mentioned above ^^.

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  14. Nathaniel, thank you for your great every-week reports! I always enjoy, when I read them.
    However, you made one small mistake with authorship this time. You wrote “YaKShin” instead of “YaSHkin”.

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  15. I’ve been using Neon for a few days. I occasionally installed Plasma to check it out but always ended up removing it because it had crappy font rendering, laggy UI, lacked organization and lacked some options while having too many of others.
    Now I can say it fits most of my needs, the UI still lacks continuity but other than that it’s as close to perfect.

    I will say that the menubar and toolbar should have their own individual color scheme options. Maybe even add a small shadow under the bar that is closest to the content of the app, gives it a bit more depth.
    All toolbars from Dolphin to Discover should have a standard size. It’s odd looking at the toolbar of an app and having another one next to it completely different.

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