This week in KDE: our cup overfloweth with improvements

This Week in KDE 4 Minutes

Three main topics will hold the floor today: Dolphin and other file management stuff, Plasma polish, and Wayland–we’re making a bit of a push on Wayland stuff so you should see more Wayland fixes going forward! For all three, we’re concentrating on fixing longstanding issues. There’s more too, of course!

Also, as you’ve no doubt noticed, I’m going to try out sending these posts on Saturday morning Europe time, instead of Sunday. Hopefully it should be a nice way to start your weekend. 🙂

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

How You Can Help

Version 20.04 of the apps using KDE’s release service–such as Dolphin, Gwenview, Okular, Konsole, Spectacle and Elisa–is going to be released soon! Once it’s released, please upgrade and submit bug reports so we can get the issues you find fixed as soon as possible–hopefully by 20.04.1. If your distro features “unstable” or “pre-release” versions, feel free to try out the new apps bundle a week early. It’s a big help!

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

38 thoughts on “This week in KDE: our cup overfloweth with improvements”

  2. > Also, as you’ve no doubt noticed, I’m going to try out sending these posts on Saturday morning Europe
    > time, instead of Sunday.

    Better that way 🙂

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  3. Very nice updates. Once it was said that the bug with lots of “thumbnails.so” processes keeping running is solved but as I see it still exists. After mounting an encrypted external HDD and browsing some images on it I have to go to Ksysgurard to manually kill those many processes then try to unmount the drive and unplug it.

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  4. Hello!

    First of all, I want to thank you and the rest of KDE developers for making such an amazing piece of software. KDE and Plasma are the desktop I use almost since I started to use GNU/Linux systems. And I read with great interest your weekly reports for more than a year 🙂

    In Plasma 5.18 (Manjaro 64 bits and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed 32 bits), the wifi password is no longer recorded between sessions: every time I log in my desktop, I had to enter the password. It didn’t happen in Plasma 5.17, but I remember that this was a bug in older versions.

    I don’t know if other people have the same issue, and a fast search in KDE Bugzilla didn’t show any report about this. So I don’t know if file a bug, or if you are aware already and keeping an eye on it.

    Thanks.

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    1. Olá
      Tente instalar o pam_kwallet.

      (based on these two blog entries and inspired by Fedora-Blog)

      First install pam_kwallet:

      sudo zypper in pam_kwallet

      Then edit the files /etc/pam.d/passwd, /etc/pam.d/login and /etc/pam.d/sddm as follows, i.e. add the lines beginning with a - (the hyphens are valid PAM syntax to reduce log entries if these PAM modules should not exist) and ending with the ### comment:

      /etc/pam.d/passwd :

      #%PAM-1.0
auth     include        common-auth
-auth optional pam_kwallet5.so kdehome=.local/share  # Add this line
account  include        common-account
password include        common-password
session  include        common-session

      /etc/pam.d/login :

      #%PAM-1.0
auth     requisite      pam_nologin.so
auth     include        common-auth
account  include        common-account
password include        common-password
session  required       pam_loginuid.so
session  include        common-session
#session  optional       pam_lastlog.so nowtmp showfailed
session  optional       pam_mail.so standard
-session optional pam_kwallet5.so auto_start  # Add this line

      /etc/pam.d/sddm :

      #%PAM-1.0
-auth optional pam_kwallet5.so kdehome=.local/share  # Add this line
auth     include        common-auth
account  include        common-account
password include        common-password
session  required       pam_loginuid.so
session  include        common-session
-session optional pam_kwallet5.so auto_start  # Add this line

      Now log out and in again to see if you do not have to type in your kwallet password.

      view raw

      pam_kwallet-guide.md

      hosted with ❤ by GitHub

      Liked by 1 person

    3. Yes, I’ve seen various reports of this on Manjaro. The fact that they all come from the same distro leads me to believe that there is a packaging or configuration issue being shipped on Manjaro. Distros have to set this up to work in a specific way (see Leone Alvarenga Machado’s comment), so if it’s broken, it’s usually the distro’s fault.

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    4. Thanks for the comments to my post.

      (I think my older post wasn’t clear enough: the password I was asked for is not the wifi password but my user password)

      I have kwallet-pam installed, although I haven’t edited the files Leone Alvarenga Machado said: the content is different in Manjaro.

      And the issue was present in my OpenSUSE system as well (but I uninstalled this one for other reasons, so I cannot check right now). So it didn’t seem distro related.

      But I solved the problem. I have the LXQt desktop installed too (for fallback in case of trouble with Plasma), which uses Network-Manager-Applet. Here, I deleted the connection and create one with the convenient data. And voilà!. Now, the user password is remembered and the connection is established automatically.

      I hope this can help someone else

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  5. Yeeeeeeeeeeeeees, more Wayland improvements. Wow, Plasma 5.19 is really getting super interesting.

    As i use Arch, and we have an amazing KDE maintainer (Antonio Rojas), i’m pretty sure i’ll be able to update really quick and of course, i’ll report every bug i can find using it, it’s the least i can do to help you a little bit in the amazing work you do everyday guys.

    As always, fantastic and terrific news from the KDE development side, thank you very much for your hard work and everyday efforts, you’re really building something incredibly big. You really rock a lot :).

    P.S.: I prefer on Saturday’s morning, rather than on Sunday’s morning, to start the weekend instead of ending it with a fantastic post that leaves us to take a peek of what’s been done this weekend (i should rather say, what’s have been finished, because of course, there’s much more work ongoing that’s not showed here, because it’s not yet finished, but i think it’s clear what i want to say), about the amazing KDE Software.

    I hope you take care a lot, and stay home KDE folks.

    A huge hug to everyone ^^.

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  6. First of all I did not expect it to be published so soon. 🙂 Now on to seriousness, this is some really great work. I noticed that I use (on a daily basis) at most 3 applications on my computer. These three are always open and only closed when the computer needs to reboot. Firefox, Thunderbird, and Liferea. All 3 are GTk applications, and the look awesome on KDE Plasma desktop. With all three I can choose to have CSD enabled or disabled and either way they look like first class citizens. Thank you to all the KDE devs very much for that. Real time switching of theming color for GTk apps, now that is just awesome. Again I am going to say it KDE Plasma desktop is the DE to use in 2020!

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  8. I watched diffs by curiosity but I never see any unit / UI tests accompanying the modifications. There are not mandatory with any change ?
    Thanks for your work

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    1. “Never” is vastly exaggerating …

      First, if the change does not affect behavior, e.g. porting away from deprecated Qt classes/methods, there should be no need for changes in any regression tests. If you have done it right, the tests pass as before.

      Second, especially UI tests are hard to do – there are many tests which simulate input and check the resulting events by e.g. hooking into Qt signal/slot mechanism, but this is limited. Parts which are not covered by unit tests somewhat rely on thorough review. There is also openSUSEs openQA, which also runs all KF5/Plasma releases before the final release, which covers quite many UI aspects.

      Third, there are a lot of unit tests, and these are extended on a regular basis. This is not required, for the reasons stated above, but it still happens. Whenever I do any changes, I check if the change is covered by existing tests and extend it if not. The new tests are often added before doing the actual changes. Other developers do it likewise.

      Liked by 1 person

  9. very nice changes this week. I’d like to ask a few question:

    1) is there any way to change konsole’s behavior regarding ctrl+tab? it goes to the last used tab while I’d prefer if it went to the next (locational) tab, so the tab to the right of where we are.

    2) since 5.18 the way network info is displayed changed, it used to be left aligned and allowed for more information to be shown, now as everything was pushed to the right to have them seemingly aligned by their : there’s a lot less space for the information to be displayed, so some of it gets truncated, there’s no way to display this information currently other than changing the “small font” setting on preferences (which makes it harder to read, and wasn’t needed on previous versions), if the alignment won’t be changed back to what it was prior to 5.18 then I think some palliative measures can be done such as reduce the padding to the right, as I see no reason for everything to be so far away to the right, and having a tooltip appear when we hover over a truncated item.

    3) I think that exe-thumbnailer output isn’t being cached (or isn’t being cached to where dolphin expects it) so previews keep getting generated in new sessions, I don’t know how to debug this, I’d like to find where dolphin actually stores the scripts(?) for thumbnails.

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    3. Actually the problem is not the alignment, but the addition of the “IPV4 Default Gateway” line, which in your language appears to have an incredibly long translation. The same thing would have happened with the old alignment too. I would recommend filing a bug at https://bugs.kde.org on i18n | es to see if the translators can some up with something a bit shorter.

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    4. unfortunately that’s the way it’s translated everywhere, at most I could think of changing “prefedeterminada” to “por defecto” but I find it’ll still subjectively ugly with that alignment, and regardless of the alignment I think the padding is too much, even the kcm network seems to have a much tinier padding to the left of its field labels. Aditionally, with the previous alignment only that field would be affected, instead of several like right now.

      Still I opened a bug for the translation

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    5. > is there any way to change konsole’s behavior regarding ctrl+tab? it goes to the last used tab while
      > I’d prefer if it went to the next (locational) tab, so the tab to the right of where we are.

      I finally got used to Ctrl+PgDown (and Ctrl+PgUp). This also allows using more related shortcuts, like Ctrl+Shift+PgDown (and Ctrl+Shift+PgUp), in Chromium, Firefox, Konsole, etc. and also Ctrl+Tab (and Ctrl+Shift+Tab) to go to the last used tab and back.

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  10. The attention to detail and consistent determination demonstrated here is nothing short of exemplary. The fairest desktop environment in all the land in my humble opinion. Ladies and Gentlemen, I salute you.

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  12. As always, thank you for the excellent work. However, I would like to report a problem with Krita, his icon is very bad and poorly defined. to fix it I download it from google images and apply it and now it is well defined, but it would be nice to have a fix upstream.

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  13. Hey nate, we’re getting close to the release of Plasma 5.19… but it looks like the breeze and menu redesign has kinda died off? Any info on that?

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    1. Many Breeze Evolution patches are landing every week! 🙂 That’s on track. The proposal to replace Kickoff with a rewritten SimpleMenu has gotten stalled as the fellow working on it got incredibly busy with non-KDE work and has had to take a break on the project.

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  16. The Media Player applet looks much better now!!!
    I’m using master and enjoying it, but I don’t remember exactly when happened but since sometime the Media Player applet don’t show AlbumArt from the Spotify app, from the logs I gathered this:

    kde.dataengine.mpris: “org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify” has an invalid URL for the mpris:artUrl entry of the “Metadata” property
    kde.dataengine.mpris: “org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.spotify” has an invalid URL for the xesam:url entry of the “Metadata” property
    file:///usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.mediacontroller/contents/ui/ExpandedRepresentation.qml:401:13: QML Label: Binding loop detected for property “text”
    file:///usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/qml/org/kde/plasma/components.3/ComboBox.qml:150:13: Unable to assign [undefined] to QQmlComponent*
    file:///usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.mediacontroller/contents/ui/ExpandedRepresentation.qml:187:21: QML Image: Error decoding: https://open.spotify.com/image/ab67616d00001e025d0e1a7e1f911b580f1cbd6e: Unsupported image format
    file:///usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.mediacontroller/contents/ui/ExpandedRepresentation.qml:140:13: QML Image: Error decoding: https://open.spotify.com/image/ab67616d00001e025d0e1a7e1f911b580f1cbd6e: Unsupported image format

    I don’t know if it’s something related to my compilation or not, so I ask here before filling a bug if it also happens to others or it’s working for others.

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    1. Percebi isso também com o spotify. Quando algum outro software utiliza o audio ele perde o foco e não volta para o spotify

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  17. It’d be really appreciated if you give some love to volume OSD.

    It is kind of annoying because of its size and position and probably the best place is in the corner near audio widged/icon tray.

    Also I find it very frustrating that it doesn’t have textual representation of current volume (at least not in breeze according to this bug https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=385602).

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