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.
I especially like the System Settings pages with multi-page navigation, thank you guys, great job as always 🙂
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I experienced no bugs personally. After a year or so away I came back and was shocked at how stable and bug-free it’s been for me on Manjaro. I used to need to go into nvidia settings to fix screen tearing, but no longer! Amazing work by the KDE team. thank you for such a light and customizable desktop and apps.
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Yeah, there are many use cases where the whole experience is largely bug-free. However Plasma is so featureful that people keep finding bugs in the less commonly used features. 🙂
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Some nice improvements this week.
The Plasma 5.17 regression with a multiple-monitor setup that is not recognizing unplugging event is hanging and not given much of an attention:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=413174
So far some users and Nate got interested in it but no developer who can do something about it spoke up. So the issue is hanging till the proper persons will look at it.
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I can reproduce. I’ll see if I can follow up.
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Dolphin telling what’s blocking the unmount of a volume is nice, but I would show it as:
One or more files on this device are opened in the Image Viewer (gwenview).
I think it’s more user friendly to show the generic name first and then the more precise one.
Also seeing image viewer or video / media player is easier to remember which file you left open (a picture or a movie).
Clicking on the volume indicator icon to mute that audio source like in Firefox is very cool, I remember that I tried this in the past. I’m glad that now it works.
As for bugs, I see that going to the right side of the screen where the scroll bar is and then clicking and holding and dragging the mouse up or down doesn’t scroll the page in Firefox as it does in dolphin.
I saw it at some point working, but now it’s not working again.
I’m not sure if the problem comes from Firefox update or Plasma update.
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Rather than missing a generic name, I would say the problem with Dolphin’s new error message is that you don’t know what Dolphin was attempting to do.
The current error message is like:
‘The device is currently busy: Error unmounting /dev/sdc2: target is busy’
So instead of:
‘One or more files in this device are opened in application “okular”‘
The following would be more descriptive:
‘Error unmounting /dev/sdc2: one or more files in this device are opened in application “okular”‘
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+1
Question: If there are more blockers, does not Dolphin list them as well?
How about adding a button to attempt to close the blockers like Windows does?
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From looking at the source code, multiple blockers seem to be properly listed:
https://cgit.kde.org/dolphin.git/commit/?id=c3b914a7faed3a7c0195ae77b40204cbc8d31fe5
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The Firefox scrollbar problem is in Plasma: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=413118
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I think it would be helpful to include a button asking if you want to proceed with device removal even with open programs.
If you are viewing a photo in gwenview and decide to remove it, this will not cause any problems.
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Not a bad idea. Please file a bug on Dolphin requesting this feature.
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It would be handy to be able to drag and drop multiple desktop files at once into kmenuedit. When there are a few to move you have to do it one at a time. Also every desktop file has “-2” added at the end of its title. Why is that?
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Thank you for everything you doing here. You are a true asset to the opensource world.
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Thanks so much for the kind words!
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Awesome job Nate. I *just* added the paths to system settings not more than 12 hours ago here starting at section 8.8 https://mmikowski.github.io/k19-10-guide/#section8. Your implementation matches it apparently exactly. A great clarification. Does this mean tabs are mostly gone from system settings now?
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Which tabs? The Configure Desktop > Tweaks page will be removed in 5.18.
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Nice, Plasma 5.18 keeps improving and seems really nice. The last Plasma 5.X LTS release before Plasma 6, though.
Thank you, as always, to everyone who make all this fantastic software possible.
I think i’ll check Plasma Mobile at my OnePlus One, with postmarketOS, when this latter gets more stable, and not an alpha version, but yeah, pretty interesting.
A huge hug to everyone ^^.
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