Plasma 5.17 was released this week to glowing reviews! As with most new releases, our loyal users wasted no time in finding all the bugs we missed! So you know what that means, right? We all burned the midnight oil fixing the problems you found, and Plasma 5.17.1 will be released in just a few days with everything we’ve knocked out so far (detailed below) so never fear!
New Features
- The System Settings Widget Style page now has a shiny new grid-style user interface that follows the new format and looks and works much better (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
- The weather widget now shows windy conditions with fancy new icons (me: Nate Graham, Shawn Starr, and Carson Black, Plasma 5.18.0 and Frameworks 5.64):
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- Clicking the “Defaults” button in the System Settings Global Shortcuts page no longer erases all the Task Switcher shortcuts (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.12.10)
- The new startplasma-* apps no longer break multi-line shell functions and environment variables (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.17.1)
- When you plug an external screen into a laptop, close the laptop’s lid, and then re-open it, the laptop’s screen is now re-enabled as expected (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.17.1)
- Certain System Tray icons no longer have an ugly black background (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.17.1)
- Non-critical notifications are no longer inappropriately suppressed when an external screen is connected to a laptop and the laptop’s built-in screen is disabled (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.1)
- Some GTK2 apps no longer look weird after using another GTK2 app with global menu support (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.17.1)
- When one screen is a replica of another, the name of the replicated screen is now shown properly in the System Settings Display Configuration page (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.1):
- The NOAA environmental visualization picture of the day wallpaper now works again (they keep changing the structure of their website so parsing keeps breaking) (Yunhe Guo, Plasma 5.17.1)
- In the System Settings Display Configuration page, the rotation icons no longer have huge borders and mis-positioned tooltips (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.1)
- The “bouncing app icon” effect (which can be disable if you hate it, BTW) is now scaled to the proper size when using High DPI scaling (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.1)
- When the version strings in Discover’s Updates page become shortened because there’s not enough space to display everything, they now return to their full forms when the window is resized to add additional space (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
- The System Settings Compositor page no longer crashes in certain circumstances (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.64)
- Media icons throughout Plasma are no longer subtly blurry (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.64)
- Accessing remote Samba shares is now more accurate when you enter the wrong password (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 5.64)
- KOrganizer is once again able to find and downloads add-ons (Allen Winters, Kontact 19.08.3):
- When Konsole is used outside of Plasma, its scrollbar no longer floats over the left side of the window (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.12.0)
- Search results in Discover are now more accurate, particularly for exact matches (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, AppStream 0.12.10)
User Interface Improvements
- Previews in the System Settings SDDM theme chooser page are no longer ugly when using a high DPI scale factor (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.1)
- The System Settings Display Configuration page now lets you switch between the settings for multiple connected displays using a combobox (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.1)
- Discover’s “Updates are available” notification is no longer persistent and once again disappears on its own, because there’s already a persistent thing in the System Tray when updates are available (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.1)
- The Plasma Audio Volume applet now uses an outline-style star icon for the “Default Device” buttons corresponding to non-default devices (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
- The scale factor value in the System Settings Display Configuration page is now expressed as a percentage rather than a decimal, and now limits the increments to 6.25% on X11, which minimizes visual glitches in applications (this restriction is not present on Wayland, which is able to handle a broader range of scale factors) (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
- The System Settings Thunderbolt Device Management page now shows a placeholder message in the device list when it’s empty so you don’t think it’s broken (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
- You’re now warned when launching a new Windows executable that can be opened with WINE (Yunhe Guo, Frameworks 5.64)
- Dolphin no longer tortures you by displaying advanced search options that won’t work when you’re searching in a non-indexed location; instead they’re just hidden instead (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 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.
Amazing and fast work by the KDE buttkicking wizards once again. About the “The scale factor value in the System Settings Display Configuration page is now expressed as a percentage rather than a decimal”-thing: On my HD laptop, unfortunately and somewhat annoyingly (yup, it’s a word..?) I have to use the –force-device-scale-factor= on a number of programs .desktop files, like so: https://imgbox.com/XFPsuYzE Will this new percentage-style affect this in any way, as in: will I have to do something differently to get the same results?
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Internally the factor stays the same, it’s just the label which now offers a different visual representation and displays the value in terms of percentage instead of a pure fractional number.
Therefore you don’t need to change the “–force-device-scale-factor=x.yz”.
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Nope, this won’t affect that at all.
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> Discover’s “Updates are available” notification is no longer persistent
Finally! 🙂
Discover offers me some updates, which make wonder a little bit:
There’s an available update for eg “org.freedesktop.Platform.html5-codecs” 18.08 -> 18.08 (!sic) offered via FlatPak.
There’s no description of the package in Discover, further it seems to update to the same version it already has and last I can’t remember to have ever used FlatPak on this system. Maybe you can demystify the situation for me so that I can finally install the update without too much worry. 🙂
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We recently changed the text to say “Update to version 18.08” in Discover, but yeah, overall this is kind of weird. AFAIK it’s mostly Flathub’s issue for not supplying chaneglogs for runtime updates.
The fact that you’re getting runtime updates means that you must have installed some Flatpak thing in the past. Try running `flatpak list` to find out what it is.
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Thank you guys so much for your amazing work!
Listening to users’ opinion is what I love about KDE.
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You’re very welcome!
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Give me back classic scrollbars! Not some thin, barely visible lines! And don’t forget about arrow buttons!
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Amen brotha! See https://phabricator.kde.org/T9126. This is something I want to eventually do.
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Thank you very much! It’s good to know something is planed at least.
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Wow, the progress you are making is amazing. Thanks for the hard work.
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Thanks so much for the kind words!
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I just got a docking station for my laptop and could not for the life of me figure out why notifications were being suppressed. Now I know! And it’s being fixed!
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Not all the things. Very annoying bugs still not fixed under Wayland preventing me working under its session.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=408468 – KRunner/Yakuake on Wayland
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=386114 – KRunner/Yakuake on Wayland
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=385920 – Huge mouse cursor
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I know, it wasn’t literally all the things. 🙂
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I’m really impressed by KDE’s development, it’s great to see just how far it has came.
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Hi Nate,
Thanks for all your (and other developers) hard work.
On System Settings, is there a specific reason for keeping ‘Notifications’ and ‘Other Notifications’ separate, rather than the latter being a sub-page of the former?
In connection with 6.25% scale options, possibly adopting 100%, 125%, 150%, 175%, 200%… (up to) 300% snap positions, with a checkbox (or other method) to allow more granular 6.25% steps would help simplify the experience?
Thank you in advance for your time.
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Can you provide a screenshot? I don’t see this.
Yep, in fact it’s already like that in Plasma 5.18: the slider goes in increments of 25%, and there’s a spinbox next to it that lets you enter more detailed values with increments of 6.25%.
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Sure!
Screen captures from Kubuntu 19.10 (Plasma 5.17)
http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=37c6a6fd2e55af9a4b9a041aa875f1e3
http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=b6dfc6d22fa29b6532e87cce977b6f8f
Also appears to be a formatting alignment issue, and style differences between notification pages.
To rule out user error, also checked a live session of Kubuntu 19.10 final (Plasma 5.16).
Thanks for Plasma 5.18 scale info. 🙂
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Thanks! This “Other notifications” page doesn’t come from KDE. I think maybe Kubuntu added it. Probably worth reporting to them.
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Hello! Could you please tell me where plasma does store its night color settings? Because apply button is inactive since last time I changed its settings and I can’t even disable it or set to default. The only way to disable it I’ve found is to change gamma to something else. Thank you.
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Try removing [NightColor] section in ~/.config/kwinrc.
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Thank you! That helped!
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Excuse me but last week I discover kube in planet kde, is it a kde app ? The main page of this project is https://kube-project.com/ and I don’t know if is a kde app…
thank you (and excuse me for my bad English).
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It’s a KDE app, though not very well advertised, as you’ve discovered. 🙂
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Thank you very much for your response. 🙂
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It is a KDE app.
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Yeah!!
Another great week at the KDE world.
Loving the fixes, the copy to clipboard at Spectacle under Wayland already works :).
I can’t help but to be really happy and grateful everyday and every week (Sunday) i see all the efforts and work at Nate’s weekly post.
Thank you as always to everyone who make all this possible, specially to Nate Graham, who is delivering all the news every Sunday. Wayland is becoming more usable, step by step and those’re fantastic news.
A huge hug to everyone mentioned above ^^.
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Indeed! I also love the sense of forward momentum and how amazing everything is fast becoming.
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