This week should have a little something for everyone. We’ve got bug squashing galore in preparation for Plasma 5.18, substantial speed improvements for wifi connection and Discover launch time, some welcome new features, and the return of an old one–renaming files from the context menu in file dialogs.
New Features
- Okular tabs can now be closed by middle-clicking on them, and closed tabs can now be re-opened by using the new File > Undo Closed Tab menu item or the standard ctrl+Shift+T keyboard shortcut (Bob Bai, Okular 1.10.0)
- There’s a new System Tray applet for controlling the Night color feature that automatically appears when it’s on and allows you to turn it on and off (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.18.0):
- It is once again possible to rename files from the context menu in the open/save dialogs (Méven Car and me: Nate Graham), Frameworks 5.67):
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
- Elisa’s header area no longer flickers horribly when the window is resized (Alexander Stippich, Elisa 19.12.1):
- Konsole no longer freezes when copying in TMux Copy mode or after setting a really really long tab title (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.12.2)
- Gwenview no longer crashes while generating thumbnails for images with malformed preview images (Christoph Feck and me: nate Graham, Gwenview 19.12.2)
- Gwenview no longer lets you futilely initiate drag-and-drop operations with right clicks, middle clicks, etc (Tasos Sahanidis, Gwenview 20.04.0)
- Plasma no longer crashes when you drag a file to the virtual desktop switcher (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.5)
- Searching for an app in the System Settings Notifications page and then clearing the search no longer duplicates the items in the list (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.5)
- Fixed various bugs pertaining to displays on Wayland such that KWin no longer crashes when an external screen is unplugged or turned off, turned on, or re-connected (Roman Gilg, Plasma 5.18.0)
- Fixed two of the most common KWin crashes (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0)
- Plasma is now faster to connect to a wifi network on startup by up to 3 seconds (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0)
- System Settings no longer crashes when you try to install an invalid GTK theme (Mikhail Zolotukhin, Plasma 5.18.0)
- It’s now possible to click on entries in the context menu for System Tray items on Wayland (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0
- Discover now launches much faster and no longer shows a graphical glitch in place of its main user interface while it’s launching (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.18.0)
- Icons-Only Task Manager apps now always show the “audio playing” indicator when audio is playing no matter the thickness of the Panel or the size of the icons (George Vogiatzis, Plasma 5.18.0)
- It’s no longer possible to use window tiling shortcuts on the System Tray popup (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.18.0)
- When using a vertical panel, the clock’s “Long Date” format now shows all text instead of eliding most of it (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
- Fixed a visual glitch causing the window titlebar to appear separated from the window content when using the Zoom In or Wobbly Windows effect (Vlad Zahorodnii and David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0)
- The Audio Volume applet now has the correct size and no longer shows a big empty right margin when used on the desktop outside of the System Tray (George Vogiatzis, Plasma 5.18.0)
- KRunner’s calculator now properly rounds long numbers (Lukas Pichler, Plasma 5.18.0)
- Dragging in the text field while renaming items on the desktop no longer allows you to select other items in the process (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
- Menubars in Electron-based apps are now more legible (Carson Black, Plasma 5.18.0)
- Hovering the cursor over items in the GTK file dialog now highlights those items using the correct color (Carson Black, Plasma 5.18.0)
- When using Chromium/Chrome with client-side decorations, the maximize button now changes appropriately when the window is maximized (Carson Black, Plasma 5.18.0)
- Fixed a performance and battery life issue that could cause a rogue http.so process to stick around and consume power and CPU time (Kevin Funk, Frameworks 5.67)
- Inline messages generated by the KMessageWidget widget are no longer briefly blurry on first appearance when using a fractional scale factor (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.67)
User Interface Improvements
- When searching for tags in Dolphin, the tag menu stays now open after you select each tag so you don’t need to re-open it if you want to search for files with multiple tags (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 20.04.0):
- Songs in Elisa’s playlist now make better use of available horizontal space (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.04.0):
- The Battery and Brightness system tray applet no longer flashes irritatingly and consumes extra CPU resources when the battery’s charge level is critically low; between the persistent notification and the red icon, you’re not going to miss this (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0)
- The Plasma Vaults item in the System Tray now automatically hides itself when there aren’t any vaults configured (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
- Improved the wallpaper chooser UI in various ways: the time chooser spinboxes now show their labels inline, lists now have placeholder messages when empty, and wallpaper folder list items now show the full path in a subtitle (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
- Pushbuttons used in Plasma configuration panels now have the same clear and obvious keyboard focus style as pushbuttons used everywhere else (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.67)
- Microsoft Windows link files now use the symlink file icon (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.67)
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 
Thanks for the effort. I have a question, whenever i use night color feature it disables configured icc profile, which also happen in redshift if one doesn’t use it with “preserve color” option, which doesn’t happen in gnome. Is there bug report for that or is it also related with Bug 413134 (Night colors disabled when we open gamma in settings)
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Hmm, that seems like a bug. Seems related to 413134, but not exactly the same thing. Please file a new one!
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Hell of a long bug annihilation list!
Thank you!
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Why you’re very welcome!
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By 5.18 this should have been a very stable release, without this many bugs showing up. I’m still using KDE 4.14 because it is so stable.
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Those are some massive bug fixes, thank you.
“When using Chromium/Chrome with client-side decorations, the maximize button now changes appropriately when the window is maximized”
Very cool, but it looks like that bug is still present for Firefox and Thunderbird. At least to my knowledge.
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Works for me with both. All of this requires Plasma 5.18, BTW. 5.17 still has some bugs here.
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Ah thank you Nate. You guys are guys are killing it. I have KDE Neon Unstable installed on a laptop, I will test it out. Looking forward to Kubuntu 20.02 and KDE Plasma 5.18. Both are LTS.
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We kind of are, aren’t we. 🙂 I think the Plasma 5.18 LTS is going to be an amazing release!
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Awesome improvements/fixes!
Thank you all.
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You’re very welcome!
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Yeees. The Night Color widget is back finally, thank you guys for this amazing come back.
Another week gives me more reasons to firmly believe this 2020 looks really great. Plasma 5.18 seems better week after week. Wayland improvements and fixes this week, that make me happier.
And look all that bug annihilation, this week was really something, hell yeah!!
Thank you very much to everyone who make all this work, this amazing software and make me happier, you really rock KDE Community :).
A huge hug to everyone ^^.
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Yeah, I think the 5.18 LTS is going to really kick some butt. It’s the first LTS I would consider using. 🙂 5.12 was kinda rocky, but this one is more like rock-solid!
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It would be very nice if context menu in the open/save dialogs would have also the “Open” option.
This is very useful when you click on the “Browse…” button in the web browser in some upload form and this dialog opens and you want, at that time, to make sure you are uploading the right file by checking it one more time by opening it with its associated program.
Sometimes the name of the file is not enough to be sure and opening it separately it would be great for pictures and PDF documents.
On Windows 7, when a picture is opened from context menu in the open/save dialog, the “Open” is smartly displayed as “Preview” which is quite good for what I want to do (preview it before selecting it for upload).
The faster connecting to a wifi network is very nice.
I already switched to iwd (iNet wireless daemon) in Kubuntu 19.10 to get faster connecting to wireless network, which I got, but sometimes it fails to connect at all and I don’t know why.
So, I’m very happy you’re trying to do this with the default option, but I hope this doesn’t slowes down the boot.
I want my computer to boot as fast as possible independent of the network state.
I prefer the network connecting and all the other stuff to happen after the boot process has been completed.
If there aren’t any vaults configured like after you install the OS and the Plasma Vaults item is hidden automatically, how do you create one ?
Is it possible to do it from the start menu ?
I always found this item weird to be displayed when I din’t use this feature, but now that I do, I’m wondering if these change will affect the creation of one.
BTW, somebody made a really stupid decision (I don’t want to offend anyone, but I’m really annoyed) in one of last month updates.
I’m using a Password manager called KeePassXC and since I don’t want to be easily revealed that I’m using it (by showing in the start menu or Discover) and where is it’s database file located, I decided to put it in a Plasma Vault.
So I have 2 files:
KeePassXC-2.5.1-x86_64.AppImage
Passwords.kdbx (its database file)
Every time I need to pen the password manager I double click on the KeePassXC-2.5.1-x86_64.AppImage, enter my master password and voila, everything works.
This has been working ok for months until recent updates which broke my ability to open any .AppImage file in my plasma Vault with the stupid message:
“The file …/KeePassXC-2.5.1-x86_64.AppImage is an executable program. For safety it will not be started.”
The file it still has the “Is executable” permission like it had for months, but now I cannot open it anymore.
I copied to a test folder outside of the vault, but I still have the same stupid message.
I know that Plasma has a pretty bad support for running .AppImage programs, but now it’s even worse.
I don’t want to open a terminal each time I want to run a .AppImage program.
Now I regret that I installed the updates so soon instead of waiting for some months and now I have to deal with this serious productivity regression.
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I have heard before the request to allow opening a file from the file dialog without really opening it. Basically the desire is a quick but large/full size preview, right? macOS does this really well with its “Quick Look” feature that allows you to see a full-size preview from the file dialog. The file dialog already has a little preview sidebar (which is closed by default), but it would be nicer to be able to see a larger preview, yeah. I’ll keep this in mind.
The Vaults item is still visible in the Stay Tray’s popup. “Hidden” isn’t really the best word to describe this, sorry.
As for your AppImage problem, this is a bug, and a really annoying one. I got another report of it and investigated, but I was unable to reproduce the issue myself or identify a bug in the code that caused it. 😦 Could you please file a bug report?
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Sweet! Now let’s get KRunner back into shape with searching Window titles.
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Works fine for me. Can you file a bug if you’re having a problem?
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Tags:
Tags are stored in xattrs.?
“baloo stores tags in xattrs (extended attributes) on the filesystem. To show them as entered in dolphin, type: xattr -l * assuming the right packages (“xattr” in debian) are installed.”
> https://userbase.kde.org/Baloo
Problem: What happens if you copy a file to another system/file system. Tags are lost? I read several times that digiKam has a similar problem.
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Generally, yes. If the foreign filesystem doesn’t support xattr attributes, then they’ll be lost. Similar to how Classic macOS files would have resource fork data stripped when copied to a Windows filesystem.
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Yeah. There isn’t really anywhere else to store them though.
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> bug massacre
Excellent!
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Great, especially seeing ”When searching for tags in Dolphin, the tag menu stays now open after you select each tag so you don’t need to re-open it if you want to search for files with multiple tags” made me really happy, I wasn’t expecting such a quick fix for that. KDE devs are really impressive. 🙂
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They really are. 🙂
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nvidia drivers with gtx 760 are incredibly laggy for me. i have latest KDE and arch linux. resizing windows, hovering over taskbar, general performance is like 5fps. how to fix?
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Step one is to file a bug report. 🙂 https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/Issue_Reporting
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Great work as always. The comic viewer Peruse is still in development?
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Yeah. It has only one developer who works on it intermittently, but it’s not abandoned or anything. As with most small FOSS projects, more contributors would help things along. 🙂
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