Plasma has a brand-new way to edit and customize widgets and panels: a global “edit mode” that can be entered using the context menu for the desktop and panel, or pressing-and-holding on the desktop with a touchscreen. While in this mode, widgets and panels are editable and movable. This solves a number of problems and yields the following improvements:
- The Desktop toolbox (that little hamburger menu in the corner of the screen that nobody liked) is now gone forever!
- The modes are now much clearer, with “Locked” mode being a mostly hidden thing for system administrators.
- The panel toolbox button (the “two sliders” icon at the end of your panel) is now hidden unless you’re in the global edit mode, which means that the bottom-right-most pixel of the screen can be used to trigger the Present Windows widget, or any other widget you put at the very end of a panel.
- Editing widget size and position is much faster while in this new edit mode.
- The panel context menu has been made more useful, and now displays more panel-related actions.
Here’s a video of it in action:
This work was mostly done by Marco Martin, with assistance from Björn Feber, and ideas from many others in the KDE VDG. The remaining rough edges will be polished before the release of Plasma 5.18 (which is an LTS release, let us not forget). Overall I find it to be a huge improvement!
But wait, there’s more! Much, much more…
(Other) New Features
- Toolbar items in Kirigami-based apps now respond dynamically to the amount of space available: when there’s lots of horizontal space, they all appear with icons and full text. As the amount of space decreases, they lose their text and then move into an overflow menu on the right-hand size of the window (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.64):
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- Fixed a common crash with wallpaper slideshows which could even crash your lock screen (David Redondo, Plasma 5.17.1)
- KRunner no longer crashes when used to switch to an open window (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.1)
- The System Settings Mouse page’s “Flat” acceleration settings really actually finally works now! (Mirai Komachi, Plasma 5.17.1)
- System Settings no longer displays empty items on the home page for pages that aren’t installed (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.1)
- In the System Settings Display Configuration page, the visualizations of each connected screen is now larger and more usable when more than one screen is connected, and text within them is no longer elided (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.1)
- Widgets on the desktop no longer lose their positions when an additional display is connected (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.17.2)
- KRunner’s default shortcut now works again for new installs (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.17.2)
- The Minimize All widget now correctly un-minimizes windows that it’s minimized (Vlad Zagorodniy, Plasma 5.17.2)
- The System Settings Window Decorations page no longer has a broken layout when using wordy languages like German or Brazilian Portuguese (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.2)
- Fixed keyboard input when screen sharing on Wayland (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.18.0)
- The System Tray now correctly displays special “I need attention” icons for apps (such as Konversation) that have defined them (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.18.0)
- The System Settings Night Color page now shows units for the “Transition Duration” setting (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
- When you use the “Get New [thing]” functionality on the various System Settings pages, subsequent searches for a different thing from a different page no longer display items from the first search (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.64)
- The icon used on the “Get new [thing]” buttons now imply downloading rather than marking something as a favorite (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.64):
- Konsole no longer leaves behind potentially large files in the system’s temp folder when it crashes or is quit by the system when shutting down or restarting (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.12.0)
- Dolphin now selects the correct file when using keyboard type-ahead and selecting a previously-selected file (Méven Car, Dolphin 19.12.0)
User Interface Improvements
- Spinboxes in the Audio Volume applet’s settings window, Weather widget’s settings window, and various System Settings pages now let you enter numbers using the keyboard so you don’t need to go insane manually clicking on the tiny arrows to change the values (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.1)
- Discover’s search field is now focused by default, so you can search as soon as the program opens (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
- In the System Settings Display Configuration page, it’s now more obvious that screens can be dragged around to re-arrange them (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
- The System Settings Night Color page now displays explanatory labels below the color temperature slider so you know what it will do (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0):
- Discover now shows each item’s category in search and browse lists (me: Nate Graham, 5.18.0):
- The System Settings Night Color page now has an explanatory label to help you understand what it does (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
- List headers in QWidgets-based apps and System Settings pages now look the same as they do in the newer QML-based software (David Redondo, Plasma 5.18):
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 
I feel like we need a video with sad music and flashback pictures of old plasma versions.
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In the Night Color settings I would like to choose an alternative color scheme (for example Dark Mode). Similarly, this setting should be passed to Firefox, as this follows the system dark mode preference (since version 70).
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I’ve heard quite a few people requesting this. It’s tracked by https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=408563. We may end up implementing it!
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Great improvements!
And additional things:
1. The videos in this post don’t work. When clicked on the play button, the video player UI just disappears and the static preview image stays, nothing more. I disabled all ad blockers and the result was the same.
2. It looks almost like a tradition that MinimizeAll is broken with every release… I noticed that it doesn’t un-minimize windows anymore, but since that wasn’t too important for me and I was busy, I didn’t submit the bug like before but I’m happy that someone other noticed it and now it’s fixed. Great!
3. Night mode has a serious issue with manual input of geographical data. I can’t paste any values even with the right formatting. I can’t input a point sign even with the keyboard. When I delete the first letter after the point sign, it deletes the point sign as well, so somehow point is glued to the first number behind it and it creates this issue. The only workaround is to slowly and manually edit the number but without deleting the first digit after the point, just inserting digits before it. Plasma 5.17.1. I guess it calls it for bug report if it’s not entered yet. Or maybe this is some easy, quick fix? I don’t know much about coding but I assume this should be some fairly obvious and easy to fix bug?
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1 & 2: works fine for me
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I miss the possibility to duplicate my screen to a second monitor like it was before. There was a checkbox to do that which worked like a charm. Now it is just possible to drag the screens one upon the other. But the result is different. The second screen has a different background and doesn’t show taskbar and such. It is annoying.
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Thanks for the continuous improvements.
Please have look at GTK checkboxes, e.g. of Firefox’ “Really quit?” dialogue. It changes color erratically when hovering with the cursor over it since 5.17.
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You’re probably talking about this bug, seems like it’s already known but somehow only occurs on Arch.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412078
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Actually I just started experiencing it on openSUSE Tumbleweed too.
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The bug seems to be coming from GTK: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/2217
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>The System Settings Mouse page’s “Flat” acceleration settings really actually finally works now! (Mirai Komachi, Plasma 5.17.1)
This is definitely a yuuge!
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>The System Settings Mouse page’s “Flat” acceleration settings really actually finally works now! (Mirai Komachi, Plasma 5.17.1)
This is definitely yuuge!
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Great improvements! I usually create bugs for the functionality I want to suggest, by I wanted to ask you 2 things here more directly, since you seem to get involved in almost every aspect of plasma when you see that it matters for the users.
1. Can you add a “preview” button at the print dialog which reflects all the changes (like “pages per sheet” and others), not how it’s implemented in Okular where “preview” is completely separate. Currently there isn’t any preview when it is invoked by other apps and more importantly all flatpak apps which are using xdg-desktop-portal-kde (even gtk ones). Or at least tell me where I can report it, because I cannot find the relevant component.
2. Are there any plans to officially support all (or most) kde applications on flathub? That means do all the required changes so that they can communicate properly with kio and required portals, without losing functionality. Currently there are only few kde apps on flathub and most of them have reduced functionality (which has lead me into using many gnome apps even thought I use kde plasma).
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This actually isn’t up to us. We use the Qt print dialog, which needs to gain the feature. It’s tracked with https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-57982. KDE developers do submit many patches to Qt, but it’s a significant amount of work for this one.
Yes! This is in fact a big part of our “All about the apps” goal. Please file bugs when you see reduced functionality in a Flatpak app. And BTW there are also Snaps.
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Ew. Snaps. Lol jk. Great work man! I’m on neon, and its such a great experience, EXCEPT for on my laptop that has a 4k monitor. A LOT of things just don’t scale correctly, even with the updates that came from 5.17. I’ll be posted though, waiting to get all of my machines back on plasma 😉
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1. Thx for the info!
2. That really makes me happy! Sure I’ll file bugs on flathub when I see them and maybe even try to do pull requests for simple things, since I’ve already started learning flatpak and packaging stuff myself. However, some things will need thoughtful design, like for example dolphin finding extensions for ark/filelight/k3b or others without duplicating the building of these apps. Maybe even having flatpaked kate being able to edit root files using kio which seems impossible due to sandboxing, but if you have good communication with flatpak and flathub devs then everything can happen in the future 🙂
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I am very sad about the end of the Desktop toolbox. It is in my LTS version of KDE my favourite way to shut the computer down.
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There is always the one that uses settings/options that all other hate 😉 .
The rest of us is celebrating Desktop toolbox’s demise. This was the first thing that caused confusion (what the hell it is and how to get rid of it? – everybody has this reaction when experiencing vanilla Plasma desktop for the first time) and the most annoying one. For the experienced user, this is easy to disable but if you are new this causes a lot of unnecessary annoyance.
However, Plasma still misses a good shutdown widget… but to be honest… this is all redundant. The laptop’s or computer’s power button is, in reality, the most accessible way to power down the system. It’s only that we like to interact with Plasma’s desktop so we use shutdown buttons/options ;).
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I was at first also irritated by “the cashew” when I started to work with plasma. But started immediately to like it… But nevertheless also good things are going to end eventually. 😉
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Let me reveal a hidden gem: the fastest GUI way to shutdown / reboot / etc is to right-click on your desktop and select “Leave…” option or press Ctrl+Alt+Delete.
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You are right. I knew these options before, but never used them so often. This will be going to change in the future. I like the desktop toolbox in the upper right corner, because it is only another click with the mouse to shutdown after closing all open windows.
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Really interesting, cleaning up the configuration at Plasma desktop, along with standardizing the settings to configure the desktop to your own taste, pretty nice the improvements. Customize our desktop now seems even better than before.
Thank you as always to everyone who make all this amazing software possible.
A huge hug to everyone ^^.
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