This week in KDE: it’s gonna be amaaaaaaaaaaazing

This Week in KDE 3 Minutes

Features and polish are coming in hot and heavy for Plasma and KDE apps! But have you heard about KDE’s wallpaper contest for Plasma 5.18? We held one of these for Plasma 5.16 and it resulted in the fantastic “Ice Cold” wallpaper, by Santiago Cézar. Now’s your chance to enter a wallpaper for Plasma 5.18, which is an LTS release, so it will be seen by millions of people for years! There are fabulous prizes by sponsor Tuxedo Computers. Check out the rules here: https://community.kde.org/KDE_Visual_Design_Group/Plasma_5.18_Wallpaper_Competition

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

How You Can Help

If you’ve got artistic talent, rev up your digital paintbrushes and try your hand at getting your work seen by millions of Plasma LTS users for years to come in our wallpaper competition: https://community.kde.org/KDE_Visual_Design_Group/Plasma_5.18_Wallpaper_Competition!

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: it’s gonna be amaaaaaaaaaaazing”

  2. ”The timeout indicator on notification popups is now circular and surrounds the close button (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.18.0):”

    This looks absolutely amazing!

    ”Dolphin now lets you include tags in the search criteria (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 20.04.0):”

    The fact tag search box closes after you select a tag is kinda counter-productive in my opinion, in order to make a search with 3 tags you’d have to select a tag and re-open the combobox 3 times like in the video, I think closing the combo box when you click a tag’s name ”dev / nice / #tag1” but keeping it open when you click the checkbox so you can add more tags for search would be a good compromise, assuming that’s not the behavior already.

    ”Using a mouse wheel to scroll in Dolphin and the file dialogs no longer scrolls way too fast when using a view with large icons (me: Nate Graham and Arjen Hiemstra, Dolphin 19.12.1 and Frameworks 5.66)”

    Also thanks a lot of for that, this was one of my pet peeves about Dolphin.

    Like

    Reply

    1. Yeah, keeping the menu open would be nice. AFAIK this behavior is built into QMenu and I don’t know if we can override it. No harm in filing a bug for us to investigate. 🙂

      Like

    4. This would be so great, especially if the default behavior was to keep the menu open like suggested in the 2nd comment, but a 10 year old bug… I guess I shouldn’t keep my hopes up.

      Like

    5. At least you could vote for it and add yourself to the CC to show that there’s interest. From KDE site there could be more pressure that there is a real demand. 😉

      Like

  3. Thanks for sharing the learning around relative dates – I just recommended it to a large project I contribute to!

    That one uses a lot of future dates and relative dates are easier there (e.g. ‘Next Thursday’), but you’re right, anything 3 or more days before is where I start to lose the plot. It’s a sane default that all systems should use.

    And great work as always all around, greatly looking forward to 5.18.

    Like

    Reply

  5. Very nice stuff! Awesome work as always. Thank you!

    I have a suggestion regarding the downward arrows on the back and forward buttons of Dolphin – they should be removed for a clean look. They look ugly and make the space congested. Hope KDE considers. Thanks!

    Like

    Reply

    1. What are they are actually for? Neither hovering nor clicking them does seem to trigger any action? And the hint is all the same for the whole button.

      Like

    4. Couldn’t figure out what these arrows were about as well. Would have never thought about pressing a button for longer? Seems like a totally new UI concept? I mean I know of buttons which change behaviour when clicked with shift, ctrl, etc. but a long click on a button?

      And what does it actually do when you long click? It shows a path, but what path is that? Is that two clicks back or where I started when I launched Dolphin?

      Quite confusing, at least to me…need to check if more buttons have got this long click hidden/easter egg feature… 🙂

      Aside from this, keep on going with this wonderful DE! I am really greatful for what you achieved!

      Like

    5. Yes, it’s the history of the last 10(?) opened paths. It seems to be same as in the Firefox browser, which I just discovered, too. I wonder what fraction of users know about it and use it. 🙂

      Like

  6. Thanks for great report.

    I wonder is there a way to turn off the computer when you log out or the screen locked? I miss this feature from Windwos.

    Like

    Reply

    2. I think that is actually a security / linux thing. Because if you lock the computer, you don’t want that anyone can shutdown your PC.
      However I agree that this doesn’t make sense in a home environment.

      Like

  7. Taking the subject of notifications, it would be interesting to have an option to make the file transfer notification a separate window, a button to detach it from the notification system, making it a common window that can be moved and minimized. One option I miss in the Plasma file transfer indicator is the pause button, present in Windows 10.

    Leaving a bit of the subject of the post, another possibility I would like to see in 5.18, would be the option to center a widget in the panel, today to achieve this, I have to resort to the Latte Dock panel, it would be very interesting to have such a native option.

    Like

    Reply

    1. You can do that already. Go to the Notifications page in System Settings and uncheck “Show in Task Manager” and “Show in Notifications”. Then you’ll see a window to show progress instead of a sticky notification.

      As for centering widgets, I quite agree!

      Like

  8. Great update as always. Really looking forward to 5.18. Noticed something and not sure if its a bug. I’ve never filed a bug so wanted to double check. I go to “get more wallpaper” and select one I like. Next, if I go to the “detail” view about the wallpaper you are not able to set the wallpaper from this level. It allow you to see the various versions but clicking on them does nothing. The only way to set it is to go back from the detailed view and select it in the list view. This is either a bug or probably confusing to many users.

    Like

    Reply

  9. Another thing KDE does not do well is dragging a item over the show desktop icon, ( where Desktop should apear, minimizing everything) and then dragging in the desire place on the desktop. On KDE, de dfault behavour for the panel is to be added there.. I don`t undestand why, it`s a feature everyone use. Windows does it as it should. Please try to see what I mean : Hold an item from a window, while having another window maximized in the background. now float the item over the show desktop icon without releasing it: it should show desktop. It does, but, icons are moving, making room for the item… not really usefull

    Like

    Reply

  11. Hi Nate,

    Thanks for all these improvements.

    Off-topic but, is there a particular reason to not implement “set as wallpaper” option in Dolphin and Gwenview?

    Like

    Reply

    1. I don’t know, it depends on whether we can get the Breeze-GTK maintainer interested, or if anyone else wants to fix it.

      Like

  13. Impressive improvements. I’m still not ready for KDE / Plasma since I keep switching back to Budgie or Xfce after a few hours of usage. I don’t know why. I do, however, test KDE distributions regularly and in my opinion it’s getting better with every release. Thanks for the continuous updates.

    Like

    Reply

    1. Thanks for your kind words. Do you think you could try to describe exactly what it is that makes you stop using it after a few hours? Is it the appearance? The interactivity? Plasma itself? KDE apps? Something else?

      Like

    3. I’m doing dev work on a Kaby Lake i7 with 8 gigs of RAM and an Intel integrated GPU. Everything runs like butter. Feels like you’re hitting a graphics performance issue, maybe?

      Like

  14. More good news for Plasma 5.18 LTS. Wow, this is gonna be a huge one, for real. But i’m a little bit worried, because i perceived something this past days. Wayland performance seems to be related to if the Intel’s GPU is quite older or not. My desktop PC, where i mostly spend my time, has a i7 4790K, so, a Intel’s Core 4th gen CPU with its iGPU, but my ultrabook has a more modern, Intel’s Core 8th gen CPU, so i suppose the difference comes from there, because i feel much better at the ultrabook (having the same distro + the same software that could affect to the Wayland performance), so that’s the only reason i can think about to explain the difference between both Wayland performance.

    Anyways, i really hope to change my desktop PC to a mini-PC with a much more modern, power-efficient AMD APU, so i can save space, energy and update to a really actual hardware, so i hope that together with the improvements to Wayland session with Plasma 5.18, will make a much more delightful and painless experience to me, and to all of us, because i really believe in Wayland, but it still needs (of course) a lot of work.

    As always, thank you very much for your great work and efforts to deliver such a great software to all of us, i’m always really grateful everyone.

    A huge hug to everyone ^^.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

Leave a comment