With Plasma 5.17 due to be released in less than two weeks, developers are working hard to polish it up. It’s also time to look forward towards Plasma 5.18. Features are already starting to land and it promises to be another very cool release!
There’s lots of great stuff in the apps world too, including that Filelight is now in the Microsoft Store! KDE truly is all about the apps. 🙂
New Features
- The System Settings General Behavior page now has a global animation speed slider that controls the speed of all animations and lets you turn them off entirely (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0):
- KSysGuard now shows stats for NVIDIA Graphics hardware (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0)
- System Settings now has a “Home” button that will take you back to the main page that shows the frequently-used pages (Björn Feber and Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0):
- Kate, KDevelop, and other apps that use the KSyntaxHighlighting framework now offer syntax highlighting for Perl 6 scripts (Jonathan Poelen, Frameworks 5.63)
- Kate now allows you to create new toolbar buttons that execute custom actions using the new External Tools plugin (Dominik Haumann, Kate 19.12.0)
- In Okular, you can now right-click on some selected text and easily find other occurrences of that text (Andy Sardina, Okular 1.9.0):
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- Discover no longer crashes on launch in KDE Neon. You can get the fix by upgrading manually using the terminal; run pkcon refresh && pkcon update (Harald Sitter, KDE Neon)
- The “Switch User” button on the lock screen no longer gets partially cut off on a 1366×768 screen (Kishore Gopalakrishnan, Plasma 5.17.0)
- Notification pop-ups positioned in a corner are now located equidistant from both adjacent screen edges (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.0)
- Fixed a common KInit crash that could happen when closing Dolphin while viewing the contents of an audio CD (Loïc Yhuel, Frameworks 5.63)
User Interface Improvements
- When the System Tray popup is open, notifications that would overlap it are delayed and hidden until it’s closed (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
- The Kickoff Application Launcher’s settings window no longer shows a vertical scrollbar by default and looks better overall (me: Nate Graham and David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.0):
- When hovering the cursor above a cursor preview in System Settings, the cursor now changes its appearance to match what’s beneath so you can see what it looks like and preview its animated effect, if any (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0)
- It’s now possible to select and remove multiple Bluetooth devices at a time (Daniels Umanovskis, Plasma 5.18.0)
- All of the desktop settings window’s sidebar icons are now colorful (Björn Feber, Plasma 5.18.0):
How You Can Help
Check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out ways to 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!
Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Kerning in Kickoff tab settings is broken in this screenshot https://i.imgur.com/7uTwKAD.png
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Yeah, it’s broken in a whole bunch of places, due to this Qt bug: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-49646
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Someone likes Warhammer 40k. 😛
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!
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Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe
Here’s my favorite Warboss: https://i.imgur.com/kNE2aWn.jpg
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Fantastic week, as always. Plasma 5.18 is really seeming nice. It’ll be the last Plasma 5.x LTS release, before the futuristic Plasma 6.
I still have to file a bug about KWin (Wayland session), when i got a fullscreen video, i can’t just switch to other app, i have to exit the fullscreen and then i can switch over (it happens at least with Firefox Developer Preview).
As each Sunday, i would like to thank everyone who makes all these amazing stuff, software, everything of these, possible, the whole KDE Community and of course, special thanks to Nate Graham. Thanks to him, we can enjoy this weekly reports every week, and delight ourselves with joy and seeing how KDE Software evolves and gets better & better.
A huge hug to everyone mentioned above :).
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Thanks for the Discover fix. That crash came out of nowhere and got annoying real fast.
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Great strides, thanks to all. One thing I was hoping would get fixed is when notifications show up on a 4k screen, and the bottom panel is using Auto Hide, that the notifications cover the top half of the clock and system tray widgets. If would be really good if the notifications pop-up position could be adjusted by pixels in the system settings. I use a “fat” panel so my bottom edge would need to be at least -100px and I’d also like to push it to the left by 50px so I can get at the bottom RHS vertical scroll bar of any maximized apps.
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This should already be fixed for a panel of the default height in Plasma 5.18 by https://phabricator.kde.org/D23253, but we should go even further by having the notifications actually reposition themselves when the panel becomes visible, which should help your use case. Please file a bug! 🙂
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Hmm, that sounds like it could introduce a redraw every time the panel is hidden or revealed. I’d rather not have the notifications jumping up and down when the notifications are visible or pinned. A user definable offset would be the best sledgehammer.
I’d post a bug report but every time I go near the bug reporting system my head explodes.
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Let me know the URL of the bug report you file!
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Sometimes I wish to have a full side bar like in Windows 10 instead or additional to a small panel, as this gives more space for list items and makes everything a bit clearer and there could be a small section, which always shows the latest notifications.
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You can actually do this! Just add a new panel, move it to the left or right screen edge, make it very wide, set it to auto-hide, and then put a Notifications widget in it (or whatever else you want; Calendar, Analog Clock, Notes, etc).
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That’s a not a full solution unfortunately.
With your proposal you end up having fixed widgets in the new panel. What I would like to have is a kind of a tray menu but with big buttons or tabs, which let’s you easily switch between widgets, which will completely be displayed in the new panel. 🙂
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File a bug requesting it! 🙂
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It’s now tracked here so it won’t get lost: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412483 🙂 Further discussions and ideas are welcome!
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I would like that KIO allows to create a copy list, like supercopier or teracopier.
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You may file a bug report (wishlist) for that. 🙂
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Hi, I recently downloaded Okular and I was wondering if there was an option to disable left sidebar with icons & text or use small icons instead of the current method as I believe they’re taking unnecessarily large space and only show the selected one, similar to how Firefox built-in PDF reader does. I thought I’d fill a bug report but it seems like a deliberate choice by the developers themselves.
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> I was wondering if there was an option to disable left sidebar with icons & text or use small icons
You can right click on the left sidebar and choose to hide or to display text as well as three different icons sizes. Further you can hide the bar by pressing F7 or by removing the checkmark at Settings -> Display Navigation Panel
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Thanks, hiding text and shrinking icon sizes made it better, F7 hides everything though, I’d prefer to keep only ”Contents” open for quick navigation, but this is a decent solution. 🙂
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This recently irritated me as well and I submitted the following patch to fix it: https://invent.kde.org/kde/okular/merge_requests/37
However nobody liked it and it didn’t get merged.
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