This week in KDE: new features start rolling in

This Week in KDE 3 Minutes

KDE developers have started pumping out some seriously excellent new features for Plasma and apps releases this week, with more stuff on the way soon! In addition, many bugs were fixed, and the UI polish continued apace. Take a look!

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

How You Can Help

In Plasma 5.19, we are making 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! Head over to the VDG channel to find out how you can get involved and coordinate work.

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

39 thoughts on “This week in KDE: new features start rolling in”

  1. Hi Nate! So “Resetting Breeze settings to their default values now also resets the “Draw a circle around close button” setting, as expected” fix this bug?: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=414113

    Speaking of kwin decoration, why if i choose some other theme (i tried with PlasmaX Clear/Dark) the CSD GTK apps (i tried again with “Peek”) keeps using Breeze decoration?

    Keep on Rockin’!

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    1. That’s because CSD window buttons are determined by GTK theme. I will try to do a decoration inheritance in breeze theme, but this is tricky, because kwin decorations are drawn in C++ code, but the GTK decorations are static images, hardcoded into a GTK theme.

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  2. I’m happy with The global menu applet now works on Wayland. I’m curious if it will make the latte appmenu widget functional as well or only the default Plasma appmenu widget? We’ll see.

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    1. No, LTS releases get bugfixes only, never new features. That’s what LTS means: it gets more stable, but never more feature filled. If you want the new features, you might be a better candidate for non-LTS releases! 🙂

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  4. Whoa, what a nice pack of goodies this week!

    Regarding Breeze titlebar btw: is it planned to make it customizable so old and ugly aurorae themes could finally rest in peace? Sometimes all is needed is to change the shape of titlebar buttons on order to have a consistent look with gtk apps.

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    1. Thanks!

      What do you mean by “customizable?” It is already quite customizable, but I gather not in the way that you want?

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  5. Outstanding progress, gang!

    Could some kind soul post a copy of their /etc/pam.d/sddm file for me? I think mine’s corrupted.
    There’s nothing personally identifiable in it/no passwords etc.

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    1. Mine is modified a bit, I guess you’ll get it sorted out:
      “`
      $ cat /etc/pam.d/sddm
      #%PAM-1.0
      auth include system-login
      auth optional pam_kwallet5.so
      auth optional pam_gnome_keyring.so
      account include system-login
      password include system-login
      session include system-login
      session optional pam_kwallet5.so auto_start
      session optional pam_gnome_keyring.so auto_start
      “`
      That’s from Manjaro / Arch.

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    2. I should have mentioned I’m on KDE Neon… which is not to say that won’t help. Thanks brother.

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  6. In my opinion, fullscreen managment should be done by kwin and not implemented inconsistently in each application such like kate and gwenview. A fullscreen icon should be displayed in the titlebar. In fullscreen mode, a fake title bar should appear when the cursor hit the top of the screen. This fake titlebar should have an icon for toggle fullscreen mode.

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    1. I agree with that. I remember that all application compatibility / consistency decisions were made among the decisions taken for KDE this year. Am I wrong?

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    3. That’s a sensible idea! macOS does it like that and I quite like it. Can you file a bug report proposing it?

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  7. “The global menu applet now works on Wayland (Carson Black, Plasma 5.19.0)” hell yeah!!!

    Finally, seeing some improvements about feature parity on Wayland, my desired Global Menu is coming working to Wayland, thank you Carson, and everyone else, of course.

    Well, i know i said this always, but this week is really really nice, Plasma 5.19 is looking really promising.

    I’d love to see another Wayland improvements, such as see the KWin Window Rules working again, but really, you’re doing such an insane job, you really rock a lot KDE Community.

    As always, thank you very much for this amazing software you make with lots of work and effort. It’s really terrific :).

    A huge hug to everyone ^^.

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  8. Fantastic work, thanks for all this and for these updates! KDE is a great project, I wish I’d programming skills to contribute in better ways to it, other than just reporting bugs and suggesting improvements!

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  10. As usual, lots of great work, thanks!

    However, I can already see the sticky notes “handy” DELETE button bringing grief. People accidentally clicking the button without realizing, and missing the Undo-enabling notification (which yes, stays for a long time, but eventually disappears, plus some people have a habit/reflex of closing any notification they see).
    Believe it or not, some people put things important to them in those notes, and this change can potentially lead to loss of data. I think you should rethink this “easier way of deleting” note widgets. Maybe have it ask for confirmation, or put it inside the configuration window or something… =)

    In my use case, in case someone wants it for the stats, I have a single Notes widget, and it’s always and forever there. If I don’t want the info on it, I delete de text, never the widget.

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    1. I also keep important things in a single always-there sticky note, so I’m not insensitive this concern. But I don’t think it’s a real problem. The delete button only appears when the widget’s text area is already focused, so you can’t click it by accident when focusing it. And I think if you click on the button accidentally and then miss the notification which appears and stays visible for a full minute, there’s no helping you. 🙂

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    2. EDIT: I just found that you can actually click on the hidden buttons while they’re invisible, which was a pre-existing issue but becomes is a really bad bug with this added delete button. I will fix that immediately!

      Liked by 1 person

    4. https://phabricator.kde.org/D28209

      There’s still an option that I could patch it to show a confirmation dialog if that’s not enough. Personally I find those really annoying and prefer an undo to a pre-action confirmation. If we find that the undo isn’t visible enough, maybe that means we need to do something to improve that globally.

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  12. Hi Nate!

    Thanks for Global Menu, must test it as soon as possible(without it, Wayland was a no-go for me)

    Could you please take a look at this old SDDM bug:
    https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/305

    Most people got only few sessions to choose, but some(like me, that like all old retro WMs) got plenty of them. Now to change session plasma(“P” is pretty far in Alphabet), I have to use monitor with higher resolution(It’s laptop, but got normal displays at work and home) or count presses of down-arrow key. It’s unacceptable in 2020 that you cannot scroll the list by mouse wheel(the list doesn’t fit on screen, and part of it is an offscreen non-scrollable element)

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    1. That bug only pertains to SDDM’s default theme. Presumably as a Plasma user you’re using the Breeze SDDM theme, not the built-in one. As such, we need a separate bug report in plasmashell | Theme – Breeze to track fixing the issue in the Breeze SDDM theme.

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    2. @Nate: I don’t have theme specified in sddm.conf(it’s commented) and archlinux always tries stick to upstream and be vanilla as it can be:
      https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/sddm
      extra/sddm 0.18.1-2 [installed]

      /usr/lib/sddm/sddm.conf.d/default.conf

      [Theme]
# Current theme name
Current=

# Cursor theme used in the greeter
CursorTheme=
      mar 21 00:48:08 sinistar sddm[3293]: Loading theme configuration from ""
mar 21 00:48:12 sinistar sddm-greeter[3446]: Loading theme configuration from "qrc:/theme/theme.conf"

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    3. If you’re using Plasma, it will install the Breeze SDDM theme. I’m not very familiar with how Arch packages things, but if indeed your objection is with the default SDDM theme and not the Breeze theme, then this is an SDDM issue rather than a KDE issue (SDDM is not a KDE project).

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  13. Yes, yes, yes. Nice to see the changes ❤

    I hope you can make the threaded comment more responsive. It's a bit hard to read on mobile devices

    Thank you!

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  14. I just updated packages in Manjaro KDE and now Skype and Slack have invisible system tray icons. Must be related to these recent system tray changes. Please have a look.

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