This week in KDE: 5.17 and beyond

This Week in KDE 2 Minutes

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

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

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.

Published by Nate

Published

38 thoughts on “This week in KDE: 5.17 and beyond”

  1. Thank you very much for this series! I really appreciate reading it. I am always looking forward to seeing the announcement on the Manjaro Forum (Plasma is Great).

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  2. KF6 – would it be an option to extract some parts from KF and into separate libs? For example, I would like to use textedit component with proper text highlighting and tabs for documents, but I would not like to depend on gazilion other kde libs

    Also, would it make sense to cut legacy at this point of time? E.g. in the next plasma version get rid of x session completely and allow for not having xwayland at all on the system.

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    1. That is exactly what was done for KF5. 🙂 You can use only the KTextEditor framework (and its dependencies) for this. If a framework that you want to use does pull in other dependencies, this isn’t actually a problem. They’re all small on disk and consume only a small amount of memory, and only when actually in use.

      I don’t think there’s any chance of dropping X in the KF6 timeframe. If we ever formally do that, I would like to see Wayland have 100% feature-parity with X11 first, and being used reliably in the wild by a substantial portion of our userbase for years and years first.

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    4. He’s just complaining that Wayland doesn’t work because Nvidia doesn’t use GBM. It should work with their KWin patches, but I think XWayland still doesn’t work with Nvidia in any DE.

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    5. Didn’t those patches land a release or two ago? I’m not aware of any outstanding dealbreaker issues, which is why I requested bug reports 🙂

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    6. The graphics don’t use DRI, everything goes through llvmpipe. There are tons of issues with titlebars disappearing and such. Sometimes the UI completely freezes. Tested with multiple distros with a 1080ti. Tested multiple drivers ranged from 415 and up.

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    8. 80% of desktop/laptop Linux users do not use Nvidia. The vast majority use Intel integrated graphics, which is also true for Windows. Not sure about MacOS, but wouldn’t be surprised if it was true there as well.

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    10. iirc, i had more than a few libs needed for this component (e.g. one being translation lib?). i can try again, but my point is – it could me minimized if it already is not.

      for the wayland part, as another option, would it be possible to separate it so desktop with only wayland can be installed?

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    1. No idea, sorry. I don’t have the technical ability to work on or follow the development of graphics drivers.

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  4. I really love seeing this in my news feed. I think that more distributions or DE’s should follow this example of a concise and we’ll written “changes” blog. Most of which I see is a jumbled mess of tech jargon the average user would not be interested in reading. Great job!

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    2. I’m curious why the transistion to GitLab, given their security issues and complete inability to back up data probably. Github IMO is a much better choice for this type of thing.

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    5. The decision to move away was a community decision, but among the problems: 1) virtually abandoned upstream; no possibility of future improvements or communications channels to developers 2) Awkward patch submission and review workflow compared to the fork-and-merge approach popularized by GitHub 3) inability to replace Bugzilla if desired

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  6. I’m glad that the right-edge of the screen grabbing of the scrollbar in maximized Firefox works again.
    The only think that I see missing is a way to make the scrollbar wider because it’s so thin and it’s pretty hard to grab it in non-maximized windows where you cannot use the right-edge trick.
    I think Windows 7 has the best width of the scrollbars on both 2K and 4K screens.
    I see that if I change the Application style to MS Windows 9x the scrollbar comes closer to what I want, but then it changes also other things that I don’t want.

    And possibly a bug that I see is the fact that Firefox doesn’t follow the Application style that I just set and its scrollbar it’s still the same thin one.
    Chromium seem to obey my ‘MS Windows 9x’ application style with a bit wider scrollbar and the right-edge grabbing of it also works.
    I wonder what Mozilla is doing with Firefox that it has so bad integration with KDE.

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    1. Not unless you or someone else (maybe us) forks the old version of the Breeze widget theme. I don’t think we’re planning to offer a way to use the old one, sorry.

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    2. That’s a shame but I understand it, the new one doesn’t look bad, it’s just previous one looked great aesthetically but usability is more important, given it’s almost invisible in a blue background like shown in that bug report. Unfortunately I don’t have the abilities or the time to learn them to keep the current checkbox. :/ Nonetheless, thanks for the answer!

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    1. This bug is a minor papercut with a patch submitted and accepted. It’s only a matter of time before the fix is released to users. 🙂

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    1. I wish I had news, but there’s nothing new on the KWallet front. A lot of great stuff is happening on the backend for other projects, and as a result we’re a bit stretched thin right now. More developers are sorely needed!

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    2. Thanks anyway for the answer! I would love to help but that is not possible for me now.
      Anyway, thanks for the awesome job on plasma!

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  11. Always fantastic. Qt 6 is really close and of course, Plasma 6, KDE Frameworks 6 and KDE Applications using this new version of the framework will be not that far, which looks like nice. I already read about other KDE devs, for the KF6 Sprint, and it looks promising at least. But for the moment, improving what we have is nice as always.

    Thank you very much to everyone who make possible this amazing software.

    A huge hug to everyone ^^.

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