This week in KDE: Plasma 5.19 beta and more

This Week in KDE 3 Minutes

The KDE Plasma 5.19 beta has been released! We’re very proud of the work that’s gone into 5.19, but it is no doubt buggy and in need of QA. Please help us find all the bugs we missed! Go test it in your favorite distro; options include KDE Neon Testing or Unstable editions, openSUSE Krypton or KDE:Unstable repos, Arch’s kde-unstable repos, and probably many more I’m not familiar with (please tell me!).

But wait, there’s more…

New Features

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

User Interface Improvements

How You Can Help

Go test that Plasma 5.19 beta! Read the first paragraph of this post to see how. 🙂

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover 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

46 thoughts on “This week in KDE: Plasma 5.19 beta and more”

    1. I don’t use Dropbox, but I think, you need to install the “dolphin-plugins” package and then in the Dolphin settings under Services activate “Dropbox”.

      At least that’s how it works for Git and such.

      Liked by 2 people

  2. Nice set of goodies this time!
    I wish Dolphin had a setting to set displaying hidden files after regular ones (like in Nautilus). In compact and details views it’s not convenient to scroll hidden folders first in order to get to normal ones.
    Just a suggestion for a future improvement.

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=297435

      Let me quote Nate
      “If you enable Show in Groups, hidden files and folders show up in their own separate groups now (or in a single group if you don’t have “Folders first” checked). Then you can sort by date and you will basically have exactly what you want.”

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    2. No you don’t get it.
      I meant making possible display hidden files AFTER regular ones. E.g. the last normal folder in the home dir view is “Videos”, and the next is “.cache”. Now I have a list of hidden folders first, then regular folders, then hidden files, then regular files. What I was asking for is making another sequence possible:
      normal folders first – then hidden ones – then normal files – then hidden files.

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    3. > normal folders first – then hidden ones – then normal files – then hidden files.
      This you can achieve by the suggested solution, but only if sort by name.

      I guess you want to have it always grouped hidden/non-hidden independently by the sort-order. I’d say, open a bug-report / wishlist! 🙂

      Like

  3. Great work as always, thank you.

    Re: “Windows can now-be-dragged-and-dropped onto items in the Activity switcher to quickly assign them to different Activities (Ivan Čukić, Plasma 5.19.0):”

    As a twenty year KDE fan i still have absolutely no idea how Activities are meant to be relevant to me…

    This no doubt clever feature – which devs continue to invest time and effort into – remains stubbornly just out of sight. And I don’t think i am alone.

    Could do with some research to see which problems people think it fixes for them, and then some marketing to broadcast this purpose!

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  4. The colors in Konsole’s tabs look nice, but the tab’s caption are hardly readable in the screenshot. What about a colored bar of a few pixel on the bottom of the tabs, like the containered tabs in Firefox: https://imgur.com/a/OJK0UtA ?

    That way tabs could still have their colored top bar as somewhere proposed for the next breeze theme. 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. We decided that we had so many good options from prior wallpaper competitions that we could do a new one per release for the foreseeable future!

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    2. It is a great news! I love to have a new wallpaper with every new Plasma version even if I can change it myself 🙂

      Like

  6. Nice improvements and features around KDE 5.19!

    That feature which shows settings in KDE settings page, when you search them, is very useful for me.

    Thank you guys!

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  7. Some really great improvements! Especially love that things open in System Settings now and not on their own when opened via search (as I do that a lot 🙂).

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  8. Colored console tabs are cool, they might be hard to read.
    I think it requires a bit more logic, something like:
    The darker the background color -> the lighter the text color and of course.
    The lighter the background color -> the darker the text color
    But that’s probably too hard to do automatically, so it’s ok as it is.

    When split view is active the normal copy disappear and we have only copy / move tot he other pane ?
    I’m not sure this is a good idea for all the case.
    What if I remember that I need to copy a file to a pendrive or network drive, but I don’t want to change the location in the other pane, because this copy is just one time only and then I want to get back to what I was doing ?
    I would suggest to leave the Copy / Move (to the other pane as it is), but add add arrow at the right edge to open a submenu with only one option: The normal Copy / Move.

    For the Network speed widget I would like to see the Down speed first or be able to customize the order (which one is first) and also the colors (I like to make green for download and red for upload for easier understanding).

    For the Individual cores sidget it would be nice to have also an average of all the core like at the beginning or at the end with somehting like:
    All cores: 56%
    And a horizontal line below all those vertical ones to show this percentage.
    Another think that I would change is the name CPU because is confusing to new users, “cores” or “threads” is more close to reality.

    I wonder when it will be possible to test this in Kubuntu 20.04 ?
    I’m very happy to see KDE Plasma now requires Qt 5.14.
    Hopefully this will force Kubuntu developers to stop using that pretty old version and upgrade to this one like other distributions.
    Maybe this is why it takes longer to arrive, but I’m glad KDE developers took decision, otherwise we would’ve had to wait at least 2 years until Kubuntu would upgrade its Qt version.

    In any case, thank you very much to Nate and all the developers and contributors who are bringing us all these wonderful fixes and improvements!
    I need to make some money to buy some beers to all the developers!

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  9. “Dolphin now has new actions to quickly move or copy the selected files in one pane of a split view into the folder in the other pane (Antonio Prcela, Dolphin 20.08.0)”

    I was just wishing Dolphin had this feature yesterday, and was a little surprised it didn’t! Glad to see it getting added. I really appreciate all the great work you guys do at KDE!

    Also, Manjaro has a “KDE Developer Edition”.

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  10. I love the new “Move/Copy to inactive split view” option. 🙂

    Oh, and by the way, that selection of available user avatars looks so Windows XP. Ewww…

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  11. Sounds like some nice UI tweaks — very impressed with the customisation options already. Is it possible to make the taskbar and application menu opaque without having to manually edit the plasmoids? That’s the only issue I had with the previous release, things looking inconsistent depending on what’s behind them.

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    2. Cheers! Thanks for taking the time to reply. Agree that a global setting would be preferable but appreciate that doing it across multiple components won’t be straightforward, and it’s great that it’s relatively simple to tinker with and work around already.

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  12. I really like the widget’s incremental design kde remained good I didn’t like it before. Use kde for a long time, but the bugs are terrible when the bug turns on in daily use and on the bugs until you restart or shut down the pc. use all major distributions with the code and the result will always be the same error. I wish it were as solid as the gnome is.

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  13. Hi Nate,

    You and the entire KDE team are spectacular. It is amazing to see the continuous improvements in kde and plasma build into an amazingly polished product. Thank you also for the communication.

    One question, can you comment on which release will incorporate this bug fix: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=421170? It is a shocking one to experience.

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  14. Wow, what can i say, even the latest week possible, you made it to add new features to the really close Plasma 5.19.

    I really love the way that System Monitor widgets look, i use the Memory Status and the Network Monitor integrated into Latte-Dock, so i really hope to see them improve visually really soon.

    I’m really impressed, really much was finished this week or worked on, which is really great.

    I’m decided, I’m gonna go right now, just when i finish to write this comment and send it, to the KDE Bugs to check if the currently active bugs i’m suffering are already filed and if not, to file them, I’m not leaving it for later anymore.

    As always, a huge thank you isn’t enough, i know it, but at the moment, it’s what i feel i can do, thank you very much, for the huge work, incredible effort you do everyone and everyday, that “comes” visible here, every week, allowing us a much more transparent and a easily understandable report of the news, working on progress actually and the rest about KDE Software, that’s being done by the KDE Community. It’s such a delightful experience to me :).

    Without further addition, i send you a huge, warm and virtual hug to everyone of the KDE Community.

    I really hope you’re all well, all yours closest, all your dearest, stay safe please.

    KDE ROCKS!!

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    1. Thanks so much for the kind words! I’m a little sad that we had to punt some things to Plasma 5.20, but that only means it will be even better. 🙂

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  15. > If you’ve been thinking that this window is very ugly, you’re right. It’s getting completely replaced with something much nicer in Plasma 5.20, along with a totally new Users page!

    Although Plasma 5.19 is not out yet, I am looking forward to seeing more of Plasma 5.20.
    By the way, Nate, do you know if there will be Plasma 5.21 or Plasma 6?

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    1. Plasma 6 will require Qt 6, which is not released yet. Once it is released, we will not release a Plasma version based on it until it’s achieved some stability–and also porting things to it will take some time. So I would hazard a guess that Plasma 6 is at least a year and a half away, maybe more.

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  16. @Nate Google Auth fix online accounts Google section too (Currently it’s irresponsive) ,also kio-slave `Gdrive` too ????

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    2. yes, on two ‘real’ machines and on a VM as well (the last 3 comments 24,25,26 in this report are from me). There had been other bug reports pointing to telepathy, but this is not installed on my 3 machines.
      Regarding the zawertun copr, this was (still is) a good source for getting the latest plasma/kf5 additions without compiling myself. But, this doesn’t seem to relate to this speciific copr – as you can see in the report. So, maybe a general plasma problem? (or, to narrow it down, to the 20.04.x release of the apps?)

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