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.

We’re nearing the release of the 19.12 versions of many KDE apps, and in the first third of the Plasma 5.18 cycle. With this week, all the major regressions from 5.17 that I’ve been tracking have gotten fixed! If you’re still suffering from other 5.17 regressions not listed here and not yet fixed, please let me know. We want to make sure that the 5.18 LTS release is as smooth and stable as possible.

New Features

• When KFind or another external search app is installed, Dolphin now shows a quick link to open it (which can also be added to the toolbar) (Piotr Henryk Dabrowski, Dolphin 20.04.0):
  
• The Properties dialog now shows a button that will take you to the target of a symlink (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.65):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Refreshing the music collection in Elisa no longer creates momentary duplicate entries (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 19.12.0)
• When a single song is in Elisa’s playlist and repeat is active, that song now actually repeats when it is finished playing (Alexander Stippich, Elisa 19.12.0)
• Discover’s Updates page no longer has a broken layout, sorry about that (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.17.4)
• Maximized or vertically-tiled windows no longer exhibit odd behaviors with respect to shadows and window sizes when de-maximized or un-tiled (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.17.4)
• Picture Of The Day wallpaper slideshows are once again usable from the lock screen (Yunhe Guo, Plasma 5.17.4)
• Tree views in GTK or GNOME applications are now visible when using a dark color scheme (Carson Black, Plasma 5.17.4)
• The list of applications and system services in the System Settings Notifications page now has full keyboard navigation (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.4)
• When using a Weather widget on a horizontal panel with the temperature display turned on, the size of the text now matches the size of the text for the default Digital Clock (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.4):
  
• A Folder View widget in a panel now uses the correct text color for selected (not highlighted) items (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.4):
  
• When entering your password on the lock screen, if the computer goes back to sleep while the password is still entered into the password field, it’s now cleared so people can’t see it when the computer wakes up again (Méven Car, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Changing your user’s real name in the System Settings Users page no longer resets the picture (Méven Car, Plasma 5.18.0)
• When changing your user picture, if you cancel the password prompt, your picture is no longer changed anyway (Méven Car, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Improved the reliability of fetching icons from internet sources in Kirigami-based apps, which should improve stability across the board in Discover, since it makes heavy use of this functionality (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.65)
• The “Network” place in Dolphin now shows its true name in the Information Panel (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.65)
• Searching in Discover (and GNOME Software, and the pkcon command-line tool) is now case-insensitive on openSUSE (Carson Black, PackageKit 1.1.13)

User Interface Improvements

• Improved High DPI support in Yakuake so various icons are no longer blurry (Nicolas Höft, Yakuake 19.12.0)
• Dolphin’s URL navigator now auto-completes text as you type (Noah Davis, Dolphin 20.04.0)

How You Can Help

The KDE Frameworks 6 sprint is happening right now! Much work and planning for the future is being done. Alas, in just three days, all the work will not get done. This is where you can help! The KF6 workboard is chock full of small, manageable to-do items just begging for someone to knock a few out. Maybe you? 😉

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.

There are some neat things to report and I think you will enjoy them! In particular, I think folks are really going to like the improvements to GNOME/GTK app integration and two sets of touch- and scrolling-related improvements to Okular and the Kickoff Application Launcher, detailed below:

New Features

• GTK and GNOME apps now inherit the font, icon, cursor, and toolbar style settings for KDE apps instead of making you set them separately somewhere else (Mikhail Zolotukhin, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Checkboxes and radio buttons in GTK3 apps once again follow the colors in the color scheme. An upstream librsvg change fixed the issues we were having with this feature earlier, so we could bring it back for the next Plasma release! (Carson Black, Plasma 5.18.0)
• When scrolling in Okular with the mouse, touchscreen, or keyboard keys, the scroll transitions are now animated and have inertia. I find this to be a huge improvement for reading documents with a convertible laptop! (Kezi Olio, Okular 1.10.0)
• The Kickoff Application Launcher now has hugely improved touch support, including touch scrolling, drag-and-drop, and press-and-hold to show items’ context menus (Steffen Hartlieb, Plasma 5.18.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Dolphin’s git integration is now more reliable when displaying the status and available actions for large repos (Maciej Dems, Dolphin 19.12.0)
• When using Details view in Dolphin, the “Date Photographed” column is no longer empty for JPEG files containing valid EXIF Date/Time data (Méven Car, Dolphin 19.12.0)
• Fixed a bug that could cause the lock screen to get stuck while media was playing that included square album art (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.3)
• Rotated displays now remember their positions relative to other displays after the system is rebooted (Roman Gilg, Plasma 5.17.3)
• Scrollbar handles once again have the correct colors in GTK apps and Firefox (Carson Black, Plasma 5.17.3)
• Fixed a common crash in System Settings that could be triggered by visiting the same category twice (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.65)
• Disk images that have been mounted and unmounted now disappear from the Devices Notifier applet as expected (Rok Mandeljc, Frameworks 5.65 )
• File deletion is now multi-threaded, so for example deleting a large file no longer freezes Dolphin (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.65)

User Interface Improvements

• When the cursor is hovered over a file in dolphin, the information about that file shown in the status bar no longer disappears after a second (Méven Car, Dolphin 19.12.0)
• File metadata is now available while the Baloo file indexer is performing its initial indexing (Stefan Brüns, Dolphin 20.04.0)
• KMenuEdit’s search field is now focused by default, like other apps with always-visible search fields (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The color picker icons now use familiar eyedropper-style imagery (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.65):
  
• There are new icons for Search and the Baloo file indexer (Alexander Stippich, Frameworks 5.65):
  
• Spectacle now offers OBS Studio as another option for screen recording (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.65)

How You Can Help

Do you like icons? Of course you do! But more importantly, are you interested in helping to make them? I bet you are! And you should be, because there’s lots to do! Luckily, it’s actually really easy, and we have a page in the Human Interface Guidelines that describes the rules to help guide you along. Icons in the Breeze icon theme are vector SVG files, and we use Inkscape to make and edit them. I started doing it recently with no prior experience whatsoever in either icon design or the Inkscape program. My work was crude, but VDG members very gently and patiently helped me along, and you can do it too! Here’s how: https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Submit_an_icon

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.

We’re mid-cycle in Plasma 5.17 and still working hard to fix bugs and regressions, while planning for Plasma 5.18, our next LTS release! There’s also been continued work on our apps. Check it out:

New Features

• Dolphin’s information panel can now optionally be configured to show condensed dates (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  
• It’s now possible to hide the clock on the lockscreen until the password prompt appears, turning it into a 100% faithful reproduction of an old-school screensaver (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Tabs in Konsole once again visually indicate activity (Petr Velan, Konsole 19.12.0)
• Gwenview is now faster to load images located on a potentially slow network share (Robert Hoffman, Gwenview 19.12.0)
• GTK2 apps like GIMP and Inkscape no longer have mismatched background colors under certain circumstances (Mikhail Zolotukhin, Plasma 5.17.3)
• The “Launch” buttons in Discover now work on openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.3)
• Discover no longer displays a big empty area where the screenshots should be for apps whose metadata specify invalid screenshots (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.3)
• Scrolling in Discover is no longer choppy when using Wayland (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.3)
• Clicking on the right-most pixel in a maximized or right-tiled Firefox window once again interacts with the scrollbar as expected (Carson Black, Plasma 5.17.3)
• When using the Weather widget in a narrow vertical panel with the temperature display shown below the icon, its label no longer gets cut off on the right and left sides (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.3):
  
• When using Icon View in System Settings, the pages for SDDM and KWallet no longer show an ugly gray icon in the corner of the sidebar icon (Filip Fila, Plasma 5.17.3)
• It’s once again possible to search for widgets and other add-ons from the main Featured page in Discover (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The Touchpad System Tray applet no longer stays open after losing focus (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The behavior when left- or right-clicking on System Tray icons after hiding and showing them is now more reliable (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.18.0)

User Interface Improvements

• Selected Desktop items now subtly change their appearance to become an inactive highlight when something else gains focus (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  

How You Can Help

Qt 6 is around the corner! …And everything will need to be ported to use it. But don’t worry, the 5 -> 6 transition promises to be a relatively smooth one thanks to the Qt folks working hard on compatibility and us having already started the work of porting our software away from deprecated APIs. on that subject, it’s a great way to help out if you’re into backend work and appreciate a clean codebase. Check out the Phabricator workboard for the KF6 transition to learn more!

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.

This week we continued fixing bugs in Plasma 5.17! We know that it was a bit buggier than the 5.16 release was, and we strive to do better. If you’d like to help out with this, please test our Plasma beta releases by switching to the unstable/beta testing repos in your rolling release distro of choice. For example, Arch and openSUSE Tumbleweed. Beta releases of KDE apps will show up in these repos as well. It’s super fun! Try it, you’ll like it! 🙂

New Features

• Dolphin now tells you what’s blocking unmounting a mounted volume (David Hallas, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  
• When importing photos, Gwenview no longer fails to import photos to paths containing slashes, and also now automatically creates folders as needed (Bard De Vries, Gwenview 19.12.0)
• The volume indicator icon on a Task Manager button can now be clicked to mute that audio source (Farid Boudedja and Björn Feber, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The weather widget can now show pressure in “millimeters of mercury” (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.18.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Okular’s annotations now show times in your local time zone, not GMT (Oliver Sander, Okular 1.8.3)
• Dolphin’s embedded Konsole panel now recovers keyboard focus correctly after being closed and re-opened (Alex Miranda, Konsole 19.12.0)
• Konsole’s split view feature now respects the user’s preference to start or not to start in the current directory (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.12.0)
• We reverted the change to make checkboxes and radio buttons in GTK apps follow the colors in your color scheme. It ran afoul of a GTK bug that caused them to turn black when hovered over. We could not find a workaround for the GTK bug, so reverting the change was our only remaining option for the time being (Carson Black, Plasma 5.17.2)
• Fixed a common crash in System Settings when running on Wayland(Roman Gilg, Plasma 5.17.2)
• Random wallpaper slideshows are random again (oops, sorry about that) (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.2
• Discover can now cancel the installation of Snap apps without freezing (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.2)
• When Discover is run in another desktop environment, it no longer autostarts itself on login automatically, on the assumption that the other DE has its own update mechanism already (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.2)
• Discover now accepts URLs in the form “appstream:[app]“ (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.2
• When using a color scheme that results in black text on the login and lock screens, the text no longer has a weird fuzzy black shadow behind it (Filip Fila, Plasma 5.17.2)
• The System Settings Virtual Desktops page no longer has a broken layout when using wordy languages like German or Brazilian Portuguese, and the Window Decorations page has a better default size when opened in a standalone window (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.2)
• KMenuEdit can once again apply changes that require creating a directory as a part of the save operation (Wolfgang Bauer, Plasma 5.17.2)
• The “bouncing app icon” animation played while launching apps is once again visible for people using the (default) “Resolution Independent” cursor size setting (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.3)
• The “Defaults” button in the System Settings Fonts page now works properly (Kevin Ottens, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Titles in non-multi-page System Settings pages that are written in QML no longer receive a background highlight when hovering the mouse over them (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.64)

User Interface Improvements

• Dolphin’s extended search options view is now much more streamlined and space-efficient (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  
• The Digital Clock settings window now shows an inline preview for the configured time format, which is especially useful when setting a custom format (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The drawing tool icons have gotten a visual overhaul and are now more consistent with one another (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.64):
  
• Discover’s sidebar toolbar is now always at the top and doesn’t awkwardly scroll out of sight anymore (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.64):
  
• System Settings pages with multi-page navigation now display back and forward arrows in their headers to make navigation easier (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.64):
  

How You Can Help

I mentioned testing Beta releases earlier, but here’s something else! Do you like the idea of running a KDE-endowed free software operating system on your phone? I know I do. But did you know that KDE already has a mobile platform called Plasma Mobile? It’s real and it works and it needs your help to become mainstream! If this sounds like your cup of tea, check out https://www.plasma-mobile.org/findyourway/. You can read the Plasma Mobile project’s weekly updates in a format similar to this one here: https://www.plasma-mobile.org/blog/

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.