I’ve got big news today. Something major landed: full support for the GTK_FRAME_EXTENTS_ protocol, which hugely improves the user experience for running GTK apps that use client-side decoration headerbars! This includes GNOME apps and an increasing number of 3rd-party GTK apps too. In particular, these apps now display window shadows and have proper resize areas without needing to use a thick border. Here’s how Gedit now looks:
It’s almost native-looking! And it fits right in with the rest of your apps.
I’d like to extend a big thanks for Vlad Zahorodnii who has been working hard on this for months! The feature lands in the upcoming Plasma 5.18 LTS.
But wait, there’s more…
More New Features
- All Plasma widgets can now show or hide the background frame when placed on the desktop (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0):
- Plasma Network Manager now supports WPA3 encryption (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.18.0)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- When using Dolphin’s built-in search feature, text you enter no longer automatically becomes double-quoted (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 19.12.0)
- Fixed a bug that could cause the “Open Containing Folder” feature to fail to launch Dolphin after the first time it was used (Elvis Angelaccio, Dolphin 19.12.0)
- Konsole now automatically strips out “file://” when pasting local URLs (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 20.04.0)
- An invisible square that eats clicks no longer appears in the top-left corner of the screen after you suspend compositing and restart KWin while an app that displays a System Tray icon is running (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.17.4)
- Album art on the lock screen no longer becomes outrageously gigantic when the media title is really really long (Apurv Jyotirmay, Plasma 5.17.4)
- The weather widget’s weather station configuration window now has a better default size and margins, and the “no weather stations found” text no longer overflows the view (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.4):
- When using the Task Manager to unminimize a group of minimized windows, the windows are restored stacked in the order they were minimized rather than semi-randomly (Eike Hein, Plasma 5.18.0)
- The cursor no longer unexpectedly changes its appearance when hovering over a GTK app by default (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0)
- Network Notifications no longer displays almost-invisible icons when using a dark plasma theme but a light apps color scheme (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.18.0)
- This is more of a developer quality-of-life improvement, but compiling the Keyboard KCM in plasma-desktop is now much faster and no longer brings your system to its knees with a recursive forkbomb (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.18.0)
- Tab views in QML-based user interfaces now match the background color of the frame when using many non-default color schemes (Filip Fila, Frameworks 5.65)
- Fixed the margins on a variety of standalone dialog and assistant windows (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.65)
User Interface Improvements
- The sidebar toolbar in Discover is now a real toolbar that doesn’t scroll away. My change to do this had to be reverted because it caused problems in some apps, but Marco Martin graciously picked it up and re-implemented it in a better way. Thanks Marco! (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0)
- Discover’s Task progress sheet now looks like it’s supposed to (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0):
- Visible notifications now move out of the way rather than disappearing when the System Tray popup is open in the same area (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
- The user avatar shown in the Kickoff Application Launcher is now framed in a circle, just like on the lock and login screens (Scott Harvey and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
How You Can Help
Do you love KDE’s apps? Would you like to help develop for them? I knew you would. 🙂 It’s really fun, and you can have a major impact. Many of KDE’s apps are quite beginner-friendly; among them are Dolphin, Elisa, and Spectacle. See the full list here! These apps’ maintainers as well as KDE’s experienced developers are happy to help and mentor newcomers who want to contribute. For more information on how to get help and who to ask, see https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved#Start_Here.21
More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out more ways to help be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. 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.