This week in KDE: Plasma bug-fixing and Samba bug-squashing

This Week in KDE 5 Minutes

Plasma 5.18 has been released! A ton of work went into this release and we’re very proud of it. However I’d like to apologize for it being a bit buggier than we’d have preferred. We’ve gone balls-to-the-wall off the chain bananas fixing the issues you folks are reporting! Almost all of the highest-profile issues are fixed already, to be released with Plasma 5.18.1 in a few days! And we’ve got the less major regressions in our sights too! But still, we know that stability hasn’t always been our strong suit and we’re aiming for a higher standard next time, discussing how we can get there. So thank you for your patience and understanding, and enjoy Plasma 5.18!

Oh and we also fixed some of the most long-standing issues with Samba shares. 🙂 Check it all out:

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 in two days, so every bug report we get soon 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

47 thoughts on “This week in KDE: Plasma bug-fixing and Samba bug-squashing”

  2. Yeah ! Plasma 5.18 fixed my recurring Network Manager problem I had had for years. (after putting my laptop to sleep it would randomly take a lot of time to reconnec0 to the WIFI and indicate “no passphrase provided” then disconnect then reconnect by itself.

    Now, resuming is 100% reliable and WIFI does reconnect in a second each time.

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  4. Hello Nate,

    There is a situation I wonder. Although “OpenGL 4.6” version has been available since 2017, why does KDE Plasma use “OpenGL 2.0 (2004)” or “OpenGL 3.1 (2009)” in “Compositor”? Or why is the current technology “Vulkan” not used?

    Finally, is there a study on current graphics technologies for KDE Plasma?

    Thank you.

    Liked by 1 person

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    2. OpenGL versions are bound to hardware generations. Moving from OpenGL 2/3 to 4 wouldn’t be difficult, but 2D gains would be minimal if at all, and it would mean either abandoning lower hardware or having multiple rendering pathways. Newer hardware runs older versions extremely well, but older hardware can’t run newer versions at all.

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    4. Understood. The question is so ridiculous that Nate didn’t even bother to answer 🙂

      Sorry for this ridiculous question.

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  5. Congrats for Create New on top again!

    Can you add an option for newly opened Dolphin tabs to get the old behaviour? The new behaviour is very, very inconvenient for me.

    Up the Irons!

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    1. You mean you want folders to open in new window instead of tabs? That’s already possible; just go into Dolphin’s settings window, go to the “Startup” tab, and uncheck “Open new folders in tabs”.

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    2. No, no – I want every new tab to open the last in the line, not conceptual related like in internet browsers and how it used to be wit Dolphin some time ago. I even set my new open tabs to go to the end of the line in my browser too. This way I always know where is my newly opened tabs. For now I use a Dolphin patch to set this behaviour but it’ll be great to add an option for it. I work with many tabs in Dolphin and it’s really confusing when I open a new tab and I don’t know where it is. If they are always the last (right to left) we always know where the tabs are 🙂

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  6. All those bugs related to Samba shares have been a full showstopper for a _very_ long time.
    Thanks if now it really does work as intended…
    Maybe you could also fix smb4k which is broken for years…

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. Hopefully you won’t even need SMB4K with the upcoming 20.04 release of Dolphin. It incorporate mounting of Samba shares natively when you have the new kio-fuse feature/package installed (as we’re encouraging all distros to do).

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    2. And instead of smb4k the KDE InfoCenter will finally display share details like IP addresses, types, ACL status, paths etc. etc.? 🙂
      Does this mean smb4k will become obsolete and deprecated for KDE?

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    3. Yes, in 5.18, we added such a module to KInfoCenter. If there’s any information missing from it, let us know in the form of bug reports. 🙂

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  7. Sorry for posting here, but I’m lacking time to make decent bug report.

    In konsole Ctrl + l should behave like `clear`, but it doesn’t clear log. (Just changes position in log.)

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  9. You don’t have to apologize. It may be true that 5.18 is a bit buggier then the previous 2 releases but it’s way better than some releases in the past. The overall quality of releases is higher since some time (thanks to you and others), but we will get more or less buggy releases now and then. It’s unavoidable.

    Besides, I prefer to have buggy release that is quickly fixed then developers being afraid to add new stuff, change things. KDE team is doing wonders each time and no matter how bad situation is at the beginning, after few updates with fixes, all works great. I know I can count on it, because this is happening regularly since years.

    From current bugs, my biggest issue is the broken Overview mode. I learned to relay on it and now it just won’t work the way it used to, plus it creates some completely messy locked layer situation on windows. See:

    https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=417715

    When that bug will be fixed, the rest is just cosmetics 😉 .

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  10. Really nice release! Thanks for all this stuff! I have been more than once surprised by all these clever polished stuff that you keep pouring into Plasma.

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  11. Is Elisa’s playlist searchable now? Sometimes I would like to listen to a specific song while, in general, I’m happy with a random mix of my tracks.

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  12. Nice week, as always, the week that Plasma 5.18 LTS got released, finally. Pretty much improvements, even a bit more visually polished the notifications with KDE Frameworks 5.67, so really nice.

    But i’ll search for a few new and older bugs to report, if they’re not reported.

    The new animation to auto-discard a notification with Plasma 5.18 is invisible to me in my main Desktop PC and on my parents old laptop, while on my ultrabook is visible.

    And there’re still old Wayland session bugs that at least a few of them i reported a few time ago (the CAPS indicator at System Tray), that persist today.

    I miss a few improvements on Wayland, but i have zero doubts that the KDE Plasma/KWin Team is working on that, i even think that they could be preparing for having a much more feature and stability parity around Wayland – XOrg, for Qt 6, so Plasma 6, KDE Frameworks 6, etc, but that’s only a thought of mine.

    As always, thank you very much to everyone who make all this great software possible, to all the KDE Community, you really rock a lot!!

    A huge hug to everyone ^^.

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  13. With version 5.18, I noticed two bugs:

    – to copy and paste you have to do it twice.

    – at stop, kde needs many minutes before stopping.

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  14. I have to say it guys, with every Kde / Plasma release it only improves, it’s a pleasure to use it, and not to be sappy, but now also for the jobs for which I should restart my PC in Windows I try to avoid, just because it simply makes me feel so comfortable that I am now really struggling to do my things outside of it… As Boston said: “It’s more than a feeling”… XD

    Now, if you don’t mind, i’d like to ask a couple of things:

    It may be possible for the weather plasmoid to change or add another service (OpenWeather to say one)? Just to say, those already included give somewhat crappy results in other countries than for example the United States, many cities aren’t even recognized and the weather forecast is really inconsistent; And maybe add the possibility of having multiple switchable locations;

    Only out of curiosity, what do you think of Qt’s licensing change? There is something to be afraid of?

    I hope not to ask too much, sorry for my crap english and keep up the great work!

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    1. Your English seems perfect to me. 🙂

      Adding another weather provided is definitely possible. It’s a lot of work though.

      Qt’s licensing change doesn’t affect us at all, and I don’t think it will even affect any of the distros at all. Almost nobody outside in the FOSS world was actually using the LTS releases as such anyway. 🙂

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  18. Trying to install KDE Neon 5.18.1 results in an installer crash while updating grub. Even tried the OEM install, same thing. Also unable to submit a bugreport with the included instructions. Acer Aspire V5 571G is now very sad.. These failed installs also left a “neon” entry in the BIOS boot section, which is impossible to get rid of.


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  19. Hi,

    I’m using Plasma 5.18.5 in Gentoo Linux. When I browse an SMB share, as expected Dolphin displays an Authentication Dialogue window prompting me to enter the username, domain and password. The domain field is pre-filled with ‘WORKGROUP’. However my SMB network domain — as defined in smb.conf on all the machines on my home network — is ‘HOME’, not ‘WORKGROUP’. Is there any configuration file I can edit to change the default domain that Dolphin pre-fills in the Domain box?

    Thanks in advance for your help.

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  20. Please ignore my previous comment; I have found out how to get the Authentication Dialogue in Dolphin to display the correct SMB workgroup in the Domain field. I discovered a file ~/.smb/smb.conf containing a small subset of the contents of /etc/samba/smb.conf (not ‘workgroup =’, though) as well as several entries not in /etc/samba/smb.conf (such as ‘socket options =’). I don’t know what created the directory ~/.smb or the smb.conf in it, but it was not me. There was also a file gencache.tdb in that directory. I have deleted the two files and the directory itself, and now the Authentication Dialogue window displayed by Dolphin displays the pre-filled Domain field as ‘HOME’, which it must have read from /etc/samba/smb.conf.

    The only application I can think of, apart from Samba itself, that might possibly have created a directory ~/.smb would be smbnetfs, but smbnetfs is not installed on this machine and I have never installed it (as confirmed by genlop).

    Anyway, mystery solved. Apologies for the noise.

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