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.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
So many new contributors… Fantastic!
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Indeed!
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Thank you all for these great improvements/fixes.
Where is KDE Applications 19.12 beta?
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Should be soon. I believe there were some last-minute fixes required for the source tarballs.
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I wish that GTK programs will just inherit all my preferences from KDE.
I have set a “WindowsK10” window decoration so I can get bigger rectangular window control buttons like on Windows and there are still some programs that don’t care about that and use their own titlebar with small round buttons that I dislike.
On top of that, some also have a hamburger menu in the titlebar that I dislike also.
I want the titlebar to be simple with just the name of the program and the 3 right-side windows control buttons.
I don’t remember all the programs that have this bad behaviour, but one of them is Remmina.
BTW Nate,
Can you please do a “Sharing tutorial” in KDE Plasma when you have time?
I’ve been trying for a few days and I still don’t know how can I share a folder between my desktop and my laptop computers, both running Kubuntu 19.10 with KDE Plasma 5.17.3 on the same network connected through WiFi
I know that Dolphin is pretty good at networking as I have managed to connect it in the past over FTP and FISH protocol, bu this home sharing seems complicated to me and I don’t know why it doesn’t work.
I managed to do something with Samba, but it works only with “Allow Guests”.
The version without “Allow Guests” keeps asking me about my username and password which I give, but it doesn’t work for some weird reason.
And if you know, can you please explain what’s the difference between the “Network” and “Shared folders (SMB)”.
Thank you!
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That’s exactly the feature that just landed in 5.18. 🙂 There’s still a bit more to do: you still have to set the GTK theme separately, and GTK3 headerbar apps don’t yet respect your preferences for titlebar button positions. Those are planned!
Network sharing in Dolphin is kind of a mess right now, sorry. Rather than write up a tutorial, I’d rather just fix it. In fact I’m working on a patch for this right now. Keep your eye on https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=334875. I can’t guarantee that it will be done soon since it’s quite complicated for my meager programming skills, but I’m giving it s shot!
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Wow, that’s great, 5.18 seems to be awesome!
And yes, don’t worry about writing a tutorial about sharing, I asked for it because I thought that there is a problem only on my side, I don’t know how to properly do it.
Thanks for pointing me to the bug report and for trying to fix it!
And please don’t worry if you can’t do it.
Just seeing the willingness to fix an annoying problem for us the user is enough to me 🙂
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I am still waiting for an option to disable notification history (Removed in KDE5.16) or at the very least hide the history of file copies. I know when a copy is finished because the process bar is gone, I don’t want to keep dismissing these useless notifications. The other regression in 5.17 is the audio panel taking up more space, ideally the buttons should be smaller above a certain number of audio devices as it is much harder to see when you have 20 virtual audio devices in your desktop compared to the previous releases.
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Can you mention the bug reports for these issues so I can keep an eye on them?
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Is anyone else experiencing a bug with KDE and dolphin locking a processor core to 100%? I use GKRELLM on my second monitor and quite often I will notice one core maxed out. Ksysguard shows dolphin @ 12% (1 of 8 cores)
It happens to me quite often. I am still trying to work out the trigger conditions. I use dolphin with preview OFF and when it locks at 100% I can make it stop when setting preview to ON. If I set preview to OFF again it will return to 100%.
Nate, are you aware of any active bugs for this? Which bug tracker should I be looking at?
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Weird, I have not encountered this or any bugs about it. There is one bug about Dolphin using excessive RAM, but not CPU usage. Can you file one if you can nail down accurate steps to reproduce?
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Excessive RAM bug can be related to the CPU usage actually. When I find Dolphin is using 2-4GB of RAM(just from leaving it open a few days with a few tabs usually), trying to interact with it causes a full core/thread to be 100% usage for a while(5-10sec, seems to depend on memory usage, presumably some sort of loop logic?).
For example, scrolling becomes laggy/jumpy. Closing a tab, switching tab, bringing up context menu on the breadcrumbs are actions I recall invoking the high CPU activity in this state. It’s not as bad when memory bug/leak is at lower RAM used, such as 1GB iirc. I’m not sure how to reproduce the reproduce the memory issue, but I do encounter it frequently by leaving a Dolphin window open for several days.
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Sounds like you’re affected by https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=398908. Please feel free to comment with any relevant information that’s not already been mentioned there. Thanks!
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Done, that should be plenty of information from my experiences. Hope it helps, unable to help with the debug utility data atm.
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I’d still like it if when i open a folder it would open in a new Dolphin window, not a tab in a currently open one.
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dolphin preferences -> startup -> uncheck “open new folders in tabs”
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Hey Nate, do you know if there’s any plans to support dynamic resizing of property bars in dolphin? As is, (at least on opensuse tumbleweed) reducing the width of the window cuts off anything you have on the right (properties, modified date, etc), and resizing to fit the smaller window means things look rather ugly when maximized.
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Not to my knowledge, but feel free to file a bug about it, preferably including a screen recording that shows the problem. Thanks!
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Wait a minute, so Dolphin has Git integration?!
That’s great news to me, does anyone know how do to enable it?
Also, now that you have fixed a search focusing problem Nate (thanks for that by the way because, gosh, can those details be so annoying >.<), may I abuse your goodwill and ask if its possible to do the same for Discover? I often open it and start typing then press intro just to notice that I forgot to click on the search field. Do you know if this is the intended behaviour or if opening a bug report would be convenient?
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Dolphin settings window > Services > Check “Git” (and any other source control plugins you want active).
If it doesn’t appear there, you probably need to first install the dolphin-plugins package (it may have a different name depending on your distro). Some distros install it by default, but some don’t. Feel free to bug your distro to make it a recommended dependency of Dolphin. 🙂
Good news, I already did! The change is only in 5.18 though; it wasn’t easily backportable to 5.17. So you’ll need to wait a few months. 🙂 See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=413407
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Damn, you are awesome, thank you! \o/
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You’re welcome!
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Even KDE Neon doesn’t seem to have this in their default configuration. Any idea where to file a bug/request about that?
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https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=neon
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Did you consider changing from Noto Fonts to Ubuntu as above for UI?
I understand Noto supports many languages, but it is available in official repos of most distros if users want to install it!
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Yes. The problem with the Ubuntu font is that it doesn’t support all character sets out of the box the way Noto does. So when you’re using Noto, you’ll never see squares instead of Chinese characters, for example.
Personally I quite strongly prefer the Ubuntu font as I think it is both more readable and prettier. But the above issue is a pretty hard blocker, as KDE aspires to have all text displayed perfectly.
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Thanks so much, I can’t wait to try the new Okular features on my convertible laptops. Hopefully there are more touch and stylus features in the pipeline so that these devices get a better usabillity in KDE.
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Yep, it’s something we’re working on in various places. 🙂
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As always, fantastic improvements.
I just can’t get enough of all this fantastic software.
Thank you very much to everyone who makes all this possible.
A huge hug to everyone ^^.
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Can you please create options to disable the new animated behaviour?
Peage scrolling using the page up and page down keys and the new kinetic scrolling are annoying if you are used to discrete and snappy workflow. Please provide configuration options to disable this behaviour.
Thanks!
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