Though KDE contributors are mostly enjoying a well-deserved rest during the holiday season (hence the late post today, sorry about that), the community’s tireless souls have been laboring anyway to bring you new features and bugfixes anyway! Check ’em out:
New Features
- The System Settings Plasma Style page now has a search field and a filtering combobox that can be used to narrow down the main view, just like the one on the Colors page (David Redondo, Plasma 5.18.0):
- The System Settings Notifications page now has an entry for “Other Applications” so that you can choose the notification behavior of poorly-integrated apps that don’t identify themselves properly (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
- The properties dialog for folders now offers you the option to explore the folder in Filelight, if it’s installed (Shubham, Frameworks 5.66):
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- Elisa’s settings window is no longer implemented as a KCM (a System Settings page), so it no longer inappropriately appears in global searches (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 19.12.1)
- Dolphin’s SVN integration plugin now notices and lets you commit newly-added files (Dolphin 20.04.0, Nikolai Krasheninnikov)
- Cursor themes installed with Discover can now be deleted on the System Settings Cursors page (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.18.0)
- On Wayland, the Widget Explorer is now usable (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.66)
User Interface Improvements
- Gwenview now includes a toolbar button in fullscreen mode to let you easily show or hide the sidebar (Madhav Kanbur, Gwenview 20.04.0)
- Spectacle’s configuration window now has a “Defaults” button that lets you reset everything to the default settings (David Redondo, Spectacle 20.04.0):
- Elisa’s playlist panel can now be shown and hidden from a button on the main toolbar, and automatically hides itself when the window becomes very narrow. This makes the app quite responsive (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.04.0):
(Try to ignore the horrible flickering; we’ll get that fixed) - Added explanatory labels for the single-click/double-click settings that help you learn how to select items (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
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.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Happy holidays! Great write up and again some really cool stuff coming in. Especially the Filelight integration into file properties. Though I use Cantata at the moment, Elisa seems to be getting some good love. What is missing for me are last.fm audio scrobbling, and popup notification when new song starts to play.
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Yep, Elisa is indeed developing nicely. Your requests just go to show why there are so many music players: everyone expects different things from them. 🙂 Personally I turn off notifications on song change because I find them annoying, and I don’t use any online integration services.
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Fair point, and those things are so little on my wish list nowadays. 10 or 15 years ago the online integration would have been top for me. As I get older I just want to listen to my music and don’t really care about what’s popular. 😊
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It looks like I cannot add music files from another partition in Elisa. I am running version 19.12.0 on Kubuntu 19.10.
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Should be fixed in 19.12.1!
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Anyone tested Elisa with large music collections? I have +8k albums and the only player on linux that can handle it is Yarock. Believe me, I have tried them all. Yarock is not perfect, the repo gives me an old version and if I change something in my collection Yarock takes forever to rebuild the library..Yarock isn’t exactly pretty either..but still, that’s all linux has to offer me. For now.. I like a big grid with album covers, kinda like a mega jukebox. On windows I use MusicBee and it looks like Elisa is almost like that. Me being a lazy old geezer ask here instead of going testing yet another player.. much easier if there’s someone who has done the testing before me hehe..
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Hello,
I have more than 13000 albums (some without all tracks) and more than 54000 tracks.
I use that to test the ability of Elisa to handle large music collections.
There are still a few pain points but it should already be pretty good.
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Hey thanks for that info. How is the library scan/rebuild speed? Or startup time? Like I mentioned before, library rebuilding on Yarock is painful. I have this “old” Acer V5 laptop connected to my TV, its only job is to play music and videos. Because MusicBee is superior in every way, I am stuck on Windows for that particular machine. I have tried installing numerous distros with every imaginable musicplayer on it but they all fail miserably with my collection. I had high hopes for Lollypop, it looks just like I want but it just died an agonizing horrible sad death on every distro when I started scanning my library.. It’s like there’s many musicplayers that actually don’t play music =) Or maybe they do, after you wait a week for your collection to load..? Annoying. You had ONE jooooob… What’s the point of a local musicplayer if it’s only good for tiny collections? So, I have read about Elisa before but I assumed its development was very slow so I never got around to testing it..
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Why not give it a try and see for yourself? 🙂 And in fact, Elisa is going to be made available on the Microsoft store soon.
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Looking forward to that.
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Still a thing about Elisa: That headerbar.. It’s only function is to show the album cover? That’s a massive 25% waste of UI real estate. I mean the cover is right there in the main window and also in the playlist. I would like a toggle to get rid of it, maybe there already is one..? Also, with the headerbar gone there’s little reason to have the bar with the player functions, volume and seekbar on the top. All that stuff is more at home at the bottom of the UI..yes, that’s the boring way things are done in windows yes I know.. Maybe there’s a toggle for that too implemented already, I don’t know =) Just my two cents..
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Yes, we periodically get complaints about the huge header area. VDG folks are working on a proposed visual redesign: https://phabricator.kde.org/T12372
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Some nice mockups there, for sure. Some I don’t agree with at all, but that’s life =) At least they all seem to have a similar vision: clean and uncluttered. Will be really interesting to follow the development of this!
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Happy holidays KDE Community :).
– On Wayland, the Widget Explorer is now usable (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.66).
Yes yes yeeeees. Finally, i’ll have working the Widget Explorer under Wayland, another feature that comes to Wayland, i’m very happy.
Really, Plasma 5.18 seems like is gonna be a really nice one. I read something about the news for KF6, looks like we’ll get the Frameworks a little bit lighter for the new major release under Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 branch, another great new that makes me happier.
Thank you as always for your great work and efforts.
Receive a huge hug everyone ^^.
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Is explanatory labels for the single-click/double-click settings really necesary? I find it quite confusing.
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Yeah, I’ve gotten other comments to this effect too. I’ll be re-working this to make the text clearer. If it can’t be clarified, reverting the feature is an option.
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I thought the System Settings search was already in 5.17 or which ever version is in Opensuse Tumbleweed…
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System Settings has had a search since forever. The change listed in the post is about adding another search field on the Plasma Style page that searches through installed Plasma themes.
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Wouldn’t it make sense UX-wise to name the button in the directory properties “Analyze size usage” (or so) instead of “Explore in Filelight”?
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A very good idea! Would you like to submit a patch to change this? Should be super simple to do, and here’s the code: https://cgit.kde.org/kio.git/tree/src/widgets/kpropertiesdialog.cpp#n1110
See https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/development for instructions on how to get a development environment set up. I can help if that’s not clear enough.
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I really don’t understand the usefullness of the bottom arrow in dolphin (for the back and forward arrow)
All I want is to click on it but this doesn’t work as only a long click work.
If you want to have the same way of doing think as firefox why not but I don’t see the point in adding those bottom arrow. It is more confusing than anything and it is polluting the visual space
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