This week in KDE: Plasma 5.18 in two days

This Week in KDE 2 Minutes

You only need to wait two more days for Plasma 5.18! We’re working overtime to get it in great shape for the release and already looking forward towards 5.19, which promises to be another very exciting release. 🙂 Have a look-see:

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

How You Can Help

Upgrade to Plasma 5.18 and find all the bugs we missed! 🙂 The first point release (i.e. Plasma 5.18.1) will be released a week after launch day, so every bug report we get during that week is super important.

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

37 thoughts on “This week in KDE: Plasma 5.18 in two days”

  1. I think that the Default applications maybe should include a few more options like:
    Video player
    Audio player
    Disc burner
    Disc mounter (can KDE plasma mount a .iso file? )
    Text editor (for .txt, .conf
    Image viewer
    Document viewer ( for PDFs and ebooks)

    I have installed a few alternative video players from the store, just in case I need something to be played and I don’t have internet or the store is going down.
    After that, a lot of video files are opening with the wrong program instead of VLC that I normally wanted to be the default for all video files, no matter that I have multiple video players installed.
    I managed to manually change the file associacions to put VLC first, but it’s a pain to do for every video container (extension)

    I’m on Kubuntu 20.04 daily, which has the latest Plasma beta version
    After the latest updates, it seems that the System Settings doesn’t open anymore.
    Hope to see it working in the final version

    And another bug that I have seen for months:

    I have sometimes trouble connection to Wifi, it takes a few times until it succeeds, possibly it may have nothing to do with Plasma, but with the router.

    But the thing that I noticed and I think it’s wrong it’s the “Disconnect” button that appears after you select your wifi network and press the “Connect” button.
    The “Disconnect” button appears too early, even while the “Configuring interface” status.
    Sometimes the connection even fails to be established even though the button showed already “Disconnect” all the time.

    In my opinion, after you press the “Connect” button, the button should not show “Disconnect” buy maybe “Cancel” until the handshake, negociatiating, getting an IP address and whatever other steps may be, are all done and the connection is really established, then the “Disconnect” button should apopear.

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    1. Great ideas. We are already planning to add more Default Applications and overhaul the page.

      Please file bug reports on https://bugs.kde.org for the network connection issues. I haven’t seen those issues myself, so it’s important for people who do experience them to file bugs so the developers are made aware! 🙂

      Liked by 1 person

    3. That’s exactly what we’ll have in Plasma 5.19, except theirs has more items there and looks nicer. 🙂 I agree that ours also needs more items, and we’re working on the appearance. In particular I like the distinction being made between “Plain Text” and “Source Code”.

      Like

  2. And another problem, still on Kubuntu 20.04 with the latest KDE Plasma
    I can’t create a Vault anymore
    When I try to create it like on Kubuntu 19.10 I get to this error on final step:
    Unable to perform the operation (error code 9).
    I couldn’t find any reference what error code 9 means
    The weird part is that if I restart the comper, after I login in again I can see the Vault as if it was actually created, but when I try to open it with the password that I tried to put before, I get this error:
    Failed to open: Unable to perform the operation (error code 9).
    Can someone please check if the Plasma vault creation and opening still works correctly?
    I’m curios if this is a problem with Plasma or with the daily ISO of the next Kubuntu release.

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    1. Livin’ on the edge man! I do the same thing, effectively. I compile everything from source every day on my full-time home and work machine. It’s amazing how stable everything is.

      Like

  5. Is the Breeze revamp actually coming in 5.18? It looks like too much work for two days, but the milestone still seems to be set to Plasma 5.18…. Is it just that the work is being done behind the scenes?

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    1. It got pushed back to Plasma 5.19 or beyond. We didn’t think it was a good idea to do a bunch of radical (or really not so radical IMO) visual changes for an LTS release.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. I see. I was really looking forward to the new look. But it’s understandable that an LTS release should focus more on stability than a newer appearance 🙂
      Great work you guys have been doing with everything so far. It’s really amazing. The new Breeze looks spectacular too. So well-designed.

      Like

  6. >App windows now resize much faster and more smoothly

    This looks great! I feel like this was one of the areas where KDE was doing an ”okay” but not a great job, glad to see it has been improved.

    Liked by 1 person

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  7. Enjoying the continued dev work! I’m wondering though whether there’s a reason that titles like “Default Applications” and “Samba Status” are in the title-bars of each window, then repeated in a huge font just below above the editable controls? Wouldn’t it be neater to delegate this solely to the titlebar, freeing up vertical real-estate and avoiding duplication/redundancy?

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  8. Yeeees. Graphical information at Info Center for Plasma 5.19. Another nice week of great developers work, like every week.

    Plasma 5.19 looks promising, i’m totally agree with you Nate, that Default Applications revamp looks nice, but as the mate (@Unico) commented, i think it would be nice to have a more extensive page for that, i lack at least 3-4 more entries of default applications for everyday usages.

    We’re really close of having it on our systems, and i can’t wait to test it by myself, try out the new features, see and touch the improvements, etc.

    As always, just to thank you all, everyone who makes all this amazing software possible :).

    You really rock.

    A huge hug to everyone ^^.

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  9. Hello,

    I am looking forward to KDE Plasma 5.18, thank you to the whole KDE team for everything.

    I think the default apps should include a few more options:
    Video player
    Audio player
    Text editor (.txt, .conf)
    Image viewer
    Document viewer (PDFs and ebooks)

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  10. Great stuff as always. Elisa has been becoming my favorite music player. Are there any plans in the future to add a “close to system tray” option or desktop notifications?

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  11. Id still like to see some attention given to the application dashboard when there are over a thousand application shortcuts in there. The whole UI becomes unusable until the contents are refreshed

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  12. Fixing bugs along side with adding new features in KDE is really amazing and makes the upgrade process really smooth for users.

    Maybe I can say after plasma 5.13 a ton of new features were added but because they were smoothly pushed forward along with the bug fixes, one could not notice that much of difference when new versions came out.

    But if you run KDE 5.13 on your machine and then directly install KDE 5.17 on it, then you can feel how much everything is changed. But you will not notice that much of change when you upgrade daily and version by version.

    This smoothness in updates makes KDE really reliable and stable.

    Thank you guys for all of that amazing work!

    Liked by 1 person

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  13. Please, add support for mounting ISO, VHD, etc directly form Dolphin, it would be a great improvement. I don’t understand why you haven’t done yet.

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    1. I want this too, but I haven’t done it because I don’t think I have the technical skills to succeed at doing it. Do you, by any chance? Would you be interested in submitting a patch?

      Liked by 1 person

    2. David, until it becomes integrated, you may try CDEmu, which allows you to mount ISOs directly in Dolphin without a root account. Works fairly well!

      Like

  14. Hello Nate!

    I know it is not KDE’s fault, but QT’s fault. I am aware that the SVG clip and mask support has not been issued or solved in KDE since KDE is rewritten in QT 5.

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  16. Experiencing some theme-ing weirdness on KDE Neon with Plasma 5.18..
    Here’s the icon installer view https://images2.imgbox.com/67/a6/Feeb4xhp_o.png I only have La Capitaine installed, it shows twice.. Korla and Papirus i USED to have, but I can’t get rid of them in that selection window. What are those orange clock icons?
    Aurorae selection is funky as well https://images2.imgbox.com/68/96/hVPZKQKD_o.png You can see I have some installed but they don’t show in the “installed” section. This happens after every update in Neon, I have to look for them in the search box and install them on top of the installed ones for them to show up. Same thing with Plasma themes. Oh and I use a 1.2 scale, this thing looks fuzzy https://images2.imgbox.com/b5/f8/PCLuBcZm_o.png

    ..So yeah.. Customization on my rig is pretty busted, no idea what to do about it. I’m actually thinking about ditching Neon. I’ll put that laptop away and wait for Kubuntu 20.04 and see how things work with a new ubuntu base, and if that is ok I’ll probably try Neon again when it’s based on 20.04 as well. I think I need a holiday from computers =)

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  17. Just upgraded to Plasma 5.18 on Ubuntu 19.10 last night. All I have to say is, GOOD WORK. I only had one minor gripe which isn’t really Plasma’s fault; it’s the fact that with the new updates, menu bars for Atom/Skype (probably other Electron apps) went from nearly illegible, to completely illegible (this happened for a bunch of other distros a couple of years ago). However, this gripe turned out to be THINGS WORKING LIKE THEY SHOULD. This behaviour only happened because Electron apps were rigorously following the Plasma theme (I think Electron follows GTK which now follows Plasma). Basically, Electron apps use the “window background colour” for the menu app, with the “active window text colour”, both of which are light in Breeze (resulting in illegible menus).

    It turns out, switching to Breeze Light, or Breeze Dark fixed the issue (definitely a dumb issue on Electron’s part). I decided to try to make my own color scheme, based on Breeze Dark (which is too dark for me) and toned everything down to a medium-dark grey (kind of like the old Wonton Soup theme which I miss). It’s beautiful, easy on the eyes (window edges are easy to see) and the happy medium seems to make everything visible. And now GTK apps follow it perfectly (which was my gripe about using Wonton Soup before). I’ve NEVER seen this amount of customization work so well! You have done a very good job with something that is truly difficult. Any chance you would add a “Breeze Grey” option by default? Did you want to see a .color file for this?

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    1. In fact the bug is known and fixable: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=413915

      We tried to fix it before the release but apparently it didn’t quite work. We’ll get it fixed for real!

      But thanks so much for the kind words! Let me tell you, supporting this much customization truly is a challenge. I often marvel that we don’t have even more bugs! Also we are planning on making the default Breeze theme a bit darker and grayer, particularly the top toolbar/titlebar area. See https://phabricator.kde.org/T10891

      With this, then Breeze Light will actually be lighter, and breeze Dark will be darker.

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    2. Yeah, you can definitely fix the “electron” issue with some clever colour selection (they grey theme I made for myself worked particularly well). But really I’m not sure it’s your bug to fix. Electron has been making wonky assumptions about colour for at least two years now. I did a lot of distro hopping back in 2018 when Ubuntu killed Unity, and back then, Electron menus were illegible for Unity, Budgee, and Cinnamon (but only on the Mint-Y Darker theme).

      Ironically, Plasma was not affected by this at the time. At the moment, Electron seems to assume your window title text colour is visible on your window background colour, which only makes sense if your title-bar is the same colour as your background (which I actually don’t like). However with the amount of customization available, it was pretty easy to modify the “Dark” theme to grey which works perfectly.

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