This week in KDE

This Week in KDE 3 Minutes

At this point we’ve got nearly all of the significant regressions from Plasma 5.18 fixed (so go file bugs if you have any new ones) and we’re starting to re-focus on fixing longstanding issues and land work for Plasma 5.19. Hopefully you’ll find something in this week’s update to feel excited about! 🙂

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

How You Can Help

In Plasma 5.19, we really want to make a push on our Breeze Theme Evolution work. It’s proceeding, but would go faster with your help! There are tons and tons of mockups in the linked task and its child tasks, and what we really need at this point is people willing to help implement them. QML skills are helpful, and C++ is also useful for the needed work on the Breeze theme itself. If this sounds interesting to you, don’t be shy, step right up!

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

56 thoughts on “This week in KDE”

  1. I will be most thankful when KDE 5.x finally allows me to set individual widgets into each Virtual Desktop like I have been able to do since KDE 4.7, and it has grown really slick in 4.14. Why I can’t do that so far up to KDE 5.18 without involving “containers” and “activities”. But I can now happily say — at least in Manjaro 18.1.0 — I can set individual Wall Papers for Each Virtual Desktop!! (Don’t don’t which version of KDE 5 Manjaro 18.1.0 is using) But HALLELUJAH!! We are half way there!! Now just as soon as you can allow me to set INDIVIDUAL WIDGETS IN EACH VIRTUAL DESKTOP without making me jump through a whole bunch of hoops, just as I can now do in KDE 4.14, I’ll at last be HOME AGAIN!!

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    1. I’m on Manjaro Plasma 5.18.1 (unstable branch) and my desktop settings are copied across all virtual desktops as it ever was on Plasma 5. How can you set different wallpapers for each virtual desktop? Maybe there is a setting that I’m missing?

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  2. Hello,

    Overall, I think KDE Plasma “Shortcuts” should be renewed.

    Here are a few examples:

    – Custom Shortcuts, Basic Konqueror gestures. Konqueror is a KDE Plasma component that is no longer used and is not installed by default with KDE neon.

    – General Shortcuts, Other Shortcuts, Juk. Since Juk is replaced by Elisa Player, there should be Elisa Player shortcuts instead of Juk.

    – General Shortcuts, no shortcuts are assigned to the Event Manager.

    – There are many shortcuts waiting to be assigned.

    – Instead of the Systemmonitor application opened with CTRL + Esc keys, it should be KSysGuard. (In the system, the Systemmonitor and KSysGuard dry together. Someone needs to be deleted)

    Thank you.

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    3. These aren’t regressions in 5.18 though. They should be fixed, of course, but we focus on recent regressions first.

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    5. Can you show some love to #267277?
      Probably everyone who got into this already using latte dock but I find default KDE panel good enough except this one.

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  3. One topic I forgot to write, “GPU usage” and “GPU memory” feature added to the “Process Table” for Nvidia cards in KSysGuard can also be added to the “System Load” as well as graphics appearance.

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  5. I don’t get why removing flathub must remove also the installed programs
    The installed programs should continue to work nonetheless if the repository is still there or not.
    As for “Dolphin’s SVN commit dialog”
    Does Dolphin have a similar feature for Git too?

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    1. it’s a flatpak thing. You also can not remove a flatpak repo via CLI without remove all its apps and runtimes together.

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  6. I think the KDE Bugtracking System should instruct the user to read KDE Security Advisories for any security concerns and findings. Currently it shows “Before reporting a bug, please read the KDE bug reporting instructions, please look at the list of most frequently reported bugs, and please search for the bug”, but the instructions page has no mention of KDE’s security policy.

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  7. That’s a lot of bug fixes! 🙂

    One issue about Emoji Picker, while this isn’t a bug really, I think seeing 6 different versions of the same emoji based on color feels repetitive, makes the emoji list a lot bigger and makes finding other emojis a little bit harder. How about using the same method that Discord does, show only one color version by default and show the other 5 versions when you hover/right-click the emoji? This is what I’m talking about:

    I’m not sure which method for showing other versions are better but I think showing only one emoji would be a lot better than showing 6 by default. 🙂

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    1. Kind of a judgment call IMO. The press-and-hold UI has the disadvantages that it’s slower to select an initial skin tone, and slower to change it later. But it is advantageous in that the total size of the emoji list is smaller.

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  8. Really looking forward to kio-fuse:
    https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=415892
    https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=416429

    Ancient problems of Dolphin:
    https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=415894
    https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=416084
    https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=416085
    https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=416087
    https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=413564

    Other problems:
    https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=415089
    https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=416135

    Please close the old problems. We do not need emoji =)

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  9. Any plans to show Snap applications and their channels in Discover? For example Firefox snap has stable, esr, and beta channels (oddly no nightly). But in Discover it only shows stable.

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    2. I also don’t see any support for snap channels. When I’m looking on an app page, I see version and button to install but no option to change the snap channel to install the app from.
      I’m not sure if this is a bug or maybe we are looking in a wrong place?

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    4. Nate, while we are talking about Discover and snap applications. I noticed that there are duplication in application listing. For example there is showing for snap version of Flakon or Firefox, and also apt version. Before those were merged and we can choose the source of how to install it either a snap version or an apt version. Were these decoupled purposefully?

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  10. In my opinion most of the pressing issues were fixed. Some are still there but those are cosmetic bugs so in the end Plasma 5.18 became stable in 5.18.1, so super quickly. Thank you for your awesome work!

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  11. Ah, I wanted to ask: with Plasma 5.18 there was a new optional dependency for Nvidia users (don’t remember the exact name of the package thou). By default, it was installed by pacman. I expected to see some new card or option mentioning Nvidia but there is nothing there. Unless it’s showing only when Nvidia GPU is on? But I didn’t see anything new on Hybrid session either.

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  12. Sorry I have lost track of the possible kickoff redesign initiative. Can you please point me in the right direction? As I recall it was waiting until after 5.18.x was out the door….

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  13. Hello! I’m currently enjoying Plasma 5.18.0, but I think I’ve found something I don’t know whether to define a bug or a design flaw: To my taste I slightly modified Kwin’s Breeze decoration, disabling the circle around the “close” button and changing the button size to “small”, but opening the program “Peek”, which uses GTK3 and CSD i noticed that its decoration ignores my changes, showing what is practically the standard Breeze settings, with the circle on the “close” button and the “average” size buttons.

    I’ve added a screenshot of the problem with in the foreground the decoration of “Peek” and in the background the decoration of Dolphin, sorry if it is a little small…:

    View post on imgur.com

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    2. Already installed on my system, but for me it makes no difference in Kaidan. Let’s see if it helps thePanz.

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    4. I have the same issue on Manjaro (5.17.5) on Breeze Dark in Kaidan, but here the Emojis outlines are not white but even black on the dark background. 😛

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  17. I think I found a regression in Plasma 5.18.1 This didn’t happen before but I did file comments on existing bugs so maybe people are thinking this a continuation of bugs that existed. I didn’t get this before though so somewhere the wheels came off. 🙂
    Here is the existing bug I filed.
    https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=395583#c16
    If you want to reproduce it, have two monitors, the secondary one is rotated and a different resolution than the first, either lock or log out of the session and walk away until the monitors go to sleep. Then try and log in, either you can’t or it will take a long time and the secondary screen is messed up.

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  18. Very long standing bug: Dolphin does not highlight the entire horizontal row when selecting a file in details mode, which looks awful, makes drag and drop (from Dolphin) unduly difficult, and makes selecting files with short names more awkward than it needs to be.

    With the imminent arrival of kio-fuse CIFS/SMB mounting, Dolphin’s user interface rough edges will be the only showstopper that makes Dolphin unusable. It would be nice if that situation changed.

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  19. Yeah, the Breeze revamp, that “Tools Area” and in general the objectives for renew the Breeze theme look quite promising, as i said at the start of the 2020 post.

    Plasma 5.19 is starting to look promising (as always) and very nice, like always with this great work and support from the great KDE Community :).

    As always, thank you very much for everything you do to keep improving the great software we’ve got already, that really is something.

    A huge hug to everyone ^^.

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  20. Some biased opinions on Elisa. Tested version 0.4.2 on Kubuntu 19.10 live .iso. Here’s a pic: https://images2.imgbox.com/5d/77/Ij2sg4VR_o.png
    The red highlighted areas are of no use to me since I have a large collection (no not that one in the shot, that’s a testfolder..). All that space could instead be used to show library content, many functions like adding to playlist etc could be in a rightclick context menu. It’s way too busy atm, in my opinion. Also the album covers would be nice to be able to resize, made a lot smaller so it wouldn’t take a month to scroll through 9k albums =) Again, very biased and solely from a big library use case scenario standpoint. That’s all.

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    2. Hey some of those mockups do look really good, it’s getting closer to what I have in mind =) Just so you know where I’m coming from, here’s my setup on Windows using MusicBee https://images2.imgbox.com/86/78/kNWRkZ4P_o.png Just the artists in a list on the left, big grid with covers and playlist on the right. Don’t really even use/need the list on the left that much, it’s just fancy to click on a band name and have their albums show in the center https://images2.imgbox.com/3b/04/0O2lN6On_o.png Oh and my collection happens to have all metadata painstakingly fixed manually during the last 10 years, all with embedded artwork. Most people don’t bother, they just add a picture to the folder. Many windows players have the option to show artwork found inside album folders and that artwork is USUALLY named Folder.jpg, because that way windows live folderview shows a nice big pic https://images2.imgbox.com/26/98/kE1InrLA_o.png so a function to add “Folder.jpg” or “Cover.jpg” etc etc as what to show in the albumview would be nice.

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  21. I use Kubuntu backports and am at plasma 5.18.2. When I upgraded to 5.18 I lost small and large icon “basic” app switcher. Now there are only fancy app switcher ways, is that a bug or a feature with 5.18?
    All the best!

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    1. My neither. I guess it’s just an easy job that don’t involve as much complication as, say, making Baloo work with emails, a much more useful functionality, I think, but probably much more boring to develop.
      In any case, KDE is a volunteers association, not a paid workers’ one, like Mozilla, thus if developers just want to invest their time in banal features… well, it’s their time and their work, so they can do whatever they want with both, even if that leads to having the most “pretty” desktop environment (besides Deepin) but plenty of lacks and bugs.

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  23. The Online Accounts improvements mean that finally we’ll be able to configure a Nextcloud account, for example, and have automatically configured Kaddressbook, Korganizer and Akregator if we have contacts, calendars and news in out NC provider?
    That would be very, very cool. I never understood why there was an Online Accounts module if it had no use. Great to know it will be useful at last! 😀

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  24. Hi, who says Konqueror is not used much? It’s my favorite file browser, one of the main reasons I install KDE, and something KDE got right decades ago.

    I have yet to see a substitute for Konqueror – a universal web and file browser with easy pane splitting. The ability to open just about any file for viewing, if not editing, and then being able to easily move, copy, or link it to any other location is something I have not seen anywhere else. Systems that lack this level of function frustrate me.

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