Lots of great backend work happened this week which is very important, but not terribly flashy. And most of the in-progress work I alluded to last week hasn’t landed yet. So I’m afraid the user-visible changes will have to be a bit light this week. But fear not! For Plasma 5.17 is undergoing its last rounds of final polish and bugfixing before the release next week, and work churns along on lots of great stuff slated for Plasma 5.18 and the next apps versions!

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Font anti-aliasing settings are now read and written correctly, so you get slight RGB font hinting by default as intended (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.0)
• When Discover is loading application screenshots, the loading spinners are now located in the right place (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.0)
• Discover no longer lets you futilely try to cancel update operations that aren’t cancelable (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.0)
• Discover now shows apps’ licenses correctly (Aleix Pol Gonzales, Plasma 5.17.0)
• The system Tray icon for KeePassX and various other apps now appear correctly rather than being rendered as white squares, are no longer inappropriately scaled down in certain circumstances, and no longer crash Plasma in certain rare circumstances (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.17.1)
• When discover is being used for offline updates and an update operation fails, it now offers to repair the system (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Full Screen windows are no longer inappropriately movable or resizable on X11 or Wayland (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The System Settings Baloo file search page has been rewritten to have a shiny new QML-based user interface, which for now looks nearly identical to the old one, but provides a good base for fixing bugs and implementing new features (Tomaz Canabrava, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Kate’s editor color scheme chooser now works properly when used on a second High DPI display (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 5.64)
• Spectacle’s “Take a New Screenshot” button can once again be triggered with the Return or Enter key when focused (David Redondo, Spectacle 19.08.3)
• Dolphin no longer crashes when opened from the command line with a search schema (e.g. dolphin --new-window baloosearch://) (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 19.08.3)
• Dolphin’s Information Panel no longer includes hidden files in the file count unless hidden files are visible (Méven Car, Dolphin 19.12.0)
• When adding multiple albums to the playlist in Elisa no longer results in their songs being added in mixed-up order (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 19.12.0)
• K3B addons are once again listed in Discover (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, K3B 19.12.0)

User Interface Improvements

• Discover’s Installed apps list is now sorted by name (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.0)
• The Plasma Audio Volume applet and its System Settings page now have a more streamlines and less redundant display style, and look much more similar to one another (me: Nate Graham and Sefa Eyeoglu, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Konsole’s “Are you sure you want to close these tabs” dialog can now be made to never again appear (Kurt Hindenburg, Konsole 19.12.0)

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.

It’s been a big week for Dolphin with some new features, plus various improvements for other apps. Among them, KDE developer Christoph Cullmann went on a High DPI rampage and and fixed visual glitches in Kate and Okular on Windows when using a High DPI scale factor, and made great progress towards fixing the infamous line glitches in Konsole when using fractional scaling. Though still not quite perfect, it’s much better now.

Beyond that, a bunch of great things are in development which I can’t announce yet, but I guarantee that you’ll like them once they land in the coming weeks!

New Features

• Dolphin’s back and forward buttons can now be clicked-and-held to show a dropdown menu with the full history (David Hallas, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  

  

• The Places panel visible in Dolphin and other KDE apps now replaces the entries in the old “Recently Saved” section that never worked properly with brand new “Recent files” and “Recent folders” entries that work flawlessly (Meven Car, Frameworks 5.63 and Dolphin 19.12.0):
  
• Dolphin now lets you choose all the available options for what will happen when you open an executable script file (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Kate and other text apps using the KTextEditor framework no longer show glitchy horizontal lines when using a fractional scale factor (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 5.63)
• Fixed a bizarre rendering error with embedded Konsole panels in Kate and other apps when using two high DPI screens (Christoph Cullmann, Konsole 19.12.0)
• When Gwenview is used to crop an image with a fixed aspect radio cropper and adjusting the cropper using the top-left or top-right corners, the crop area is no longer one pixel too tall (Alex Miranda, Gwenview 19.12.0)
• Konsole’s “Trim leading spaces” feature no longer removes empty lines (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.12.0)

User Interface Improvements

• The System Settings Displays page now has an improved scaling user interface: the slider now exposes the important scale factors of 1.25x and 1.75x but lets you choose a more granular scale factor if you’d like. If you do this on X11, it displays a warning that apps might look weird (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Okular now remembers view mode, zoom settings, and sidebar view settings on a per-document basis (Oliver Sander, Okular 1.9.0)
• Gwenview and Spectacle now have consistent user interfaces for their JPEG quality mode choosers (Felipe Peter, Gwenview and Spectacle and 19.12.0):
  

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.