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):
I know that the downward-pointing arrows in the corners of the buttons are a bit ugly; we’re working on fixing that by making them much less prominent or removing them entirely - 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 ratio 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.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Great to see dropdown menu to show history has been added to Dolphin, it’s a pretty good improvement. Thanks for all the work. 🙂
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By the way, how about adding the option to show history for Dolphin by right-clicking the mouse on the left and right arrows, if you plan to get rid of downward-pointing arrows? Firefox does this and I’d say it’d be a good replacement as both of them do the job instantly, unless there’s something assigned to mouse right-click.
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That’s a good idea. We can look into it.
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Any chance of adding the ability for dolphin to mount network shares in the local file system like what smb4k does and save them in places?
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Yes. 🙂 In fact not only is there a chance, but a certainty! It’s being actively worked on now and is performing well. It just needs some final polish. I expect it to be landed before the year’s end, and hopefully sooner than that.
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Great improvements!
I use live-ebuilds from Plasma/KDE-Apps on Gentoo. I saw the downward-pointing arrow on Dolphin this week and the first thing I thought was “yeah, nice, history is available in Dolphin”. But my first intention was to open the history with the “right mouse button” like in Firefox. I never thought to open it via long-pressing left click. But I do not know how it is handled in other programs, besides Firefox.
But thanks for all the nice work! Plasma/KDE is getting better and better from week to week.
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well, I learnt today that Firefox also allows right click for getting to your history in addition to long press 🙂
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Wow! that long press feature for Dolphin is very handy. Like what you see in browsers.
But I think there is no need to show that little drop-down icon always inside buttons, for example we can show drop-down icon when the user hover over the button. So there will be a clean user interface in Dolphin.
Anyway, thank you guys for these great improvements in KDE!
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+1 for hiding as long as the mouse doesn’t hover it, but then again it may look weird in its current form as the left/right arrows are no longer centered within their buttons.
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It’s awesome to see that the HiDPI glitches are solved or worked around and by that the underlying bugs in Qt are discovered so they can eventually be fixed upstream. 🙂 Nice work!
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“Okular now remembers view mode, zoom settings, and sidebar view settings on a per-document basis”
That’s a nice touch and is useful when working with lots of different documents for my studies. You are really adding lots of small but very welcome changes, instead of adding lots and lots of features that just accumulate bugs. I will install Okular on Windows to test.
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Fantastic stuff!
Thanks for continually giving us these update Nate!
It is great to keep track of all the improvements and all the hard work!
I humbly request the following for future development:
* Integrated SMS (via KDEConnect?) so that one may send/reply to SMS by clicking on a contact in KAdressBook.
* Kaffeine to be integrated with KDEConnect media play control.
*KAdressBook’s messaging options to be integrated with Telegram, Riot.im (Matrix) and other more current communication methods. Older deprecated methods to be removed.
*Dragon Players interface controls to extend over the top of the picture and not reduce the picture frame. It is very juttery. Integrate volume control into the tool bar – not over the picture.
*The development of plugins/more fx’s for Kwave.
*Falkon to have the ability to install extensions from the Chrome store or other repo.
*Banji to be fixed so that it works. Jami is amazing for Android -it would be awesome to have communication established with Banji/KDE-Ring on the desktop! This could be the ‘Facetime’ of KDE (and Linux)!
*Plasma to ship with Latte Dock and top bar as default.
*Fix the failure to download apps from https://kde.org/applications/ Discover giving “Couldn’t open appstream”
Thanks!
KDE for the win!
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Please file a bug!
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1.25x scaling, yes!!!
Keep up with the good work guys
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OH MY GOD 1.25x scaling!!! This is super useful for Full HD laptop. Thank you so much!
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Look forward to testing out the scaling, thanks so much for attention on this !
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I’m using KDE Neon user edition. The most annoying thing is when opening a folder in Dolphin it keeps opening in already open Dolphin windows when I want it to always open in a new window!
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Uncheck “Open new folders in tabs” on Dolphin Preferences > Startup
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Hi Nate,
kwin has a bug with windows positioning on external monitor unplug action. All windows from external monitor are moved to right side of the screen. Same issue occures on Deepin with kwin.
Given that this bug has been around for a long time, I wanted to search if it’s already reported. Since I couldn’t find it, can you take I look and let me know so I could report it?
Thanks in advance
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You can report it at https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=kwin
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Reported 🙂 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412703
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It would be great if Dolphin can format flash drives (like Windows Explorer), because this operation require terminal every time when I need this
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Use Gnome Disks or KDE partition manager.
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See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=224056
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For recent Locations are there also the locations where files are open (or dolphin is open) added?
I’m thinking on copy the folder tree from dolphine into an open dialog, so that I can open an file from the folder I have open in dolphin?
Something like Open Locations
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Yeah someone just asked for that yesterday: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412668
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UI Improvements
“…
might look weird (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.18.0):”
I’m sure you don’t! (line break gave me a chuckle). 🙂
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Dear Nate, when I set up a desktop Manjaro KDE system for a family this week,
I encountered some issues, which attracted my intention and should be fixed to smooth the UX IMHO:
* If I enter “Language” in the Kicker, I get three entries: “Language”, “Language Packages” and “Language Settings”.
Those are three tools for the same purpose, all with slightly different options. That could be done better and clearer, ie unified. 🙂
Edit: While I wrote this text, I found out, that “Language Packages” and “Language Settings” are part of the Manjaro System Settings. How unfortunate that they bring their own and increase the already existing confusion.
* Also there’s a (reported) language bug: The intermediate log out screen (switch user, log out, power off..) kept being untranslated in English, while the rest
was translated correctly. This even persists after a reboot. 😦
* Then there are notifications about new language updates, but there’s no hint in the notification how to actually update them.
I had to figure it out myself first and having three different language panels did not help much. (Edit: Thanks to Manjaro)
There could be a button in the notification, which leads you directly to the correct panel or even better, just auto update the languages.t
* IIRC if two users are logged on and one turns off the computer, there’s no warning about it. (But I have to check it again tbh). 😦
* I wanted to install games under /opt/games for all users, who shall be part of the “gamer”s group for example.
This requires knowledge of the terminal and is not too trivial to be done for the average:
— Create a group, add all required users to that group, set the correct permissions for the folder and so on.
If KDE shall become something for everyone, it would be awesome if something like that could be accomplished easier
and permissions could be administrated more clearly. Although I am not sure how.
* I wanted to change the look’n’feel of al users accounts at once and unify them. How do I do that? The System settings applies only to the current user account.
Regards
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I agree it is unfortunate that Manjaro adds these unnecessary entries.
Fixed in Plasma 5.17 IIRC!
This is also a thing that Manjaro adds. I don’t like it.
There should be a warning on the logout screen (the black overlay that gives you opens for what to do). If it doesn’t appear there, please file a bug!
This seems like very advanced functionality that requires sysadmin/expert knowledge. Average people don’t do this kind of thing. They install software using the package manager or Discover in the standard systemwide location.
Yeah, this isn’t something we make it easy to do right now. Please file a bug!
To be honest I recommend KDE Neon these days for home use and relatives. My wife is happily using Neon right now in fact. Manjaro has too many quirks for average users IMO.
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> This seems like very advanced functionality that requires sysadmin/expert knowledge. Average people don’t do this kind of thing. They install software using the package manager or Discover in the standard systemwide location.
Sure, but new comers may want to install Steam or in my case GoG games systemwide and those are unfortunately not managed by the package manager nor by Discover and /opt by default belongs to root. 🙂
I will report the other bugs to Manjaro! 😉
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Steam is available in most distros’ package repos, and if not, you can get it on Flathub. Not sure about GoG games, but I do know that newcomers don’t install things to /opt. 🙂 I don’t think you need to create a separate group to grant users access, either. unprovileged users generally have read access to /opt.
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Another great week as always.
I can’t find a moment to check if the KWin issue is already reported (under Wayland, when trying to tabulate from Firefox (fullscreen), to any other window, it apparently changes the focus and everything is fine, but it’s still on the same window.
Nice improvements to Dolphin in general.
I really can’t wait to Plasma 5.17.
Thank you as always to everyone who makes all this possible, specially to Nate :).
A huge hug to everyone mentioned above ^^.
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On Plasma 5.16.5, Frameworks 5.62 with Apps 19.08.2 and ~not~ seeing any glitches in konsole or kate any more with fractional scaling…. wheee !! Thanks you !
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