This week we attended a virtual version of KDE’s yearly Akademy conference! If you missed it, there are tons of videos available on the KDE Community YouTube channel. The organizers did a truly amazing job, and it was really truly close to the fun and productivity of an in-person event. Many things were decided, projects un-stuck, and exciting long-term plans made, from which we will all be benefiting soon enough. 🙂 But we didn’t let a grueling week-long conference stop us from making your favorite software even better!
New Features
KDE now has a totally fancy all brand new development website for teaching people how to write apps that integrate well in Plasma! (Carl Schwan, already deployed on the website!)
Okular now has a command-line option to let you open a document on a specific page (e.g. okular /path/to/file.pdf#page=3) (Michael Weghorn, Okular 1.12)
If your hardware supports it, Plasma now allows you to configure a charge limit lower than 100% for your battery, to preserve its lifespan (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.20)
The text view in Kate, KDevelop, and other KTextEditor-based apps now respects the active systemwide color scheme! (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 5.75)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
Fixed a bug in Spectacle that could cause graphical corruption in screenshots for one of the screens of a multi-monitor high DPI screen setup (Méven Car, Spectacle 20.08.2)
Fixed a bug that could cause Konsole to occasionally crash when selecting or pasting text while holding down the shift key (Martin Tobias Holmdahl Sandsmark, Konsole 20.08.2)
Fixed a bug in Dolphin that could cause drag-and-drop of files into Audacious or other apps to not work (Elvis Angelaccio, Dolphin 20.08.2)
Fixed a bug in Elisa that could cause the “Empty playlist” placeholder message to still be partially visible when the playlist is hidden (Ismael Asensio, Elisa 20.08.2)
Okular’s smooth scrolling effect for the PageUp/PageDown keys no longer blocks faster scrolling by holding down the PageUp/PageDown keys or pressing them in rapid succession and now applies when searching backwards too (Kishore Gopalakrishnan, Okular 1.11.2)
Due to the above fix, Okular’s smooth scrolling has been re-enabled for the mouse wheel and arrow keys because it’s not so annoying anymore (me: Nate Graham, Okular 1.11.2)
Fixed a bug in Okular that could cause visual artifacts when scrolling after creating and selecting an annotation (Havid Hurka, Okular 20.12)
Discover is now faster to launch (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.20)
KRunner no longer loses the first few keys when invoked by typing while the desktop is focused (Piotr Henryk Dabrowski, Plasma 5.20)
KRunner is now faster to launch using its global keyboard shortcut, making it less likely to lose the first few keys you type (David Redondo, Plasma 5.20)
Substantially improved the speed and responsiveness of large and complicated QML-based apps (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.75)
Fixed a strange bug that could cause Kate to fail to change the font size after adjusting the systemwide color scheme (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 5.75)
User Interface Improvements
Okular now will soon use the same date-based versioning convention used by most other KDE apps! This means the next major version will be Okular 20.12, not Okular 1.12 (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 20.12)
When using a global menu or an in-titlebar menu button, Elisa’s menu is more typical in structure and organization (Carson Black, Elisa 20.12)
The thing in Plasma that everyone calls “edit mode” is now actually referred to using that wording in the user interface (Plasma 5.20, me: Nate Graham)
It’s now possible to create folders on the desktop using the standard keyboard shortcut (F10) (Domenico Panella, Plasma 5.20)
All of Discover’s overlay sheets are now horizontally centered in the window, rather than some of them being horizontally centered only in the right view (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20)
When you make an app full screen, there’s now a nice animated transition just like when a window is maximized (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.20)
There is now a little separator line between the navigation buttons and the breadcrumbs, for views/toolbars that have both (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.75)
How You Can Help
Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover ways to 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.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
It’s not the same thing, but in general, what’s the rhythm of the releases of KDE Plasma, Application and Framework? I never really understood it.
Otherwise, I can’t wait for Plasma 5.20 !!! Thanks a lot to all the devs.
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Hi Simon,
It’s pretty simple, I think they’ve got detailed on the pertinent page, (community.kde.org), for each one, but, put it simple, Plasma got a new release each 4 months (February, June and October), Applications every 4 months too (April, August and December) and Frameworks every month, the 2nd Saturday of each month.
Bests ^^.
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Im getting errors on some programs that require qt 5.15 when will qt be upgraded?
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isso depende da tua distro
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Needs glibc updating to 2.32 as well
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https://community.kde.org/Schedules/
There are three major product families each with a different schedule: Frameworks, Plasma, and apps.
Frameworks releases a new major version once a month. There are no bugfix releases.
Plasma releases three major versions a year, each with five bugfix releases. Every two years, a Plasma version is declared to be LTS and it receives infinite bugfix releases until the next LTS.
Apps release three major versions a year, each with three bugfix releases. There are no LTS versions, and the schedule and version numbering are different from Plasma’s cycle.
Long term, I would like to align these schedules better. For example both Plasma and apps release three times a year and have bugfix releases, so I would like to have them use the same schedule, rather than subtly different ones. I would also like to put Frameworks on a schedule that allows more time for QA and at least one bugfix release per major release to prevent the odd situation where a fix for a Frameworks regression takes more time to reach users than Plasma or Apps, despite the fact that it releases major versions more frequently.
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There’s a regression where a lot of the bug fixes in your list start with “Fixed a bug”. 😛
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I’m trying out a new style there; do you think it’s not an improvement?
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There’s too much repetition there. It does not read well and all of those sentences can be reworded without it, making them more concise. They are in a section that’s titled bug fixes, so that information is simply redundant.
You could also try grouping all the changes to a program into a bullet list like this:
$application will no longer…
– crash under this condition
– behave weirdly when you dance under the moon
– laugh at you when you try do do something serious.
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Fair enough! 😀
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Nice improvements as always! Thank you guys.
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Hi Nate. The line separator between the navigation buttons and breadcrumbs is definitely welcome. However it’s still confusing since both use the same type of icons without additional context about what they do. What about changing the breadcrumbs to slashes or something else instead?
See below for an illustration:
https://ibb.co/BzdDYyc
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That’s a good idea! Wanna fix it? Here’s the code: https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kirigami/-/blob/master/src/controls/private/globaltoolbar/BreadcrumbControl.qml#L61
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Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I’ll file a bug and attempt a patch. Is KDE Invent the preferred way to do things now?
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Indeed! Here’s the documentation on that: https://community.kde.org/Infrastructure/GitLab
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I don’t see anything confusing. The current format is well established and widely used, but I get the awkward positioning aside the same just little bigger icons. If you hadn’t brought that to my attention, I wouldn’t notice it. For me slash is reserved for paths, terminal, code. For UI arrow-like elements feel better, although, looking on your mockup, slash doesn’t look bad and especially in the context of having more distinctive UI may not be such a bad idea.
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Yeah the issue is really using the same symbol in different places to mean different things, in close proximity. We could keep the symbol arrow-like if we just used a different arrow symbol–if we had one. But a slash would probably work too, in some capacity.
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That is so cool that Plasma will allow a charge limit for my laptop battery! I am running neon on a 2012 Samsung laptop that has charge limiting to 80% set in the BIOS and it has kept my battery alive and kicking even till now. I mean, it doesn’t hold a charge very long, but at least it still holds a charge, which is better than I can say for other laptops of this age.
So many great little fixes, I cannot wait for 5.20! Awesome work, devs!
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Another nice list! I keep watching weekly, though, in the hope that KWin bugs 423319, 424752, 422689, or 425054 (all basically the same – KWin crashing with repeat hot corner activation) have been addressed. I can work around most problems, but after two years of fairly rock solid KDE use at my workplace, this bug finally forced me off and pushed me to install Gnome on my distro as a backup. It’s killing my workflow to have KWin crash every 2-3 minutes and force me to relaunch the compositor. This one just seemed to arrive with 5.19.3. If you could whisper in someone’s ear, it would be appreciated.
Keep up the great work!
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I’ll see if I can take a look, but couldn’t you just disable the hot corner in the meantime?
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Hi Nate.
Beside the recent changes to the system settings, that highlights the settings that do not have “factory values”, has there been any other improvements in the reset plasma settings feature?
Beside bug 389568 is there any other place to fallow this feature?
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That’s the place to follow.
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Nate, could you tell me if charge limit option will only be available for my laptop if it supports TLP’s Battery Charge Thresholds? Or is this option independent of the TLP?
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?
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I’ve tried several DEs and probably Plasma is the DE that I generally like most (if you make adjustments so that it doesn’t feel and look like a playful copy of Windows anymore).
I actually like Gnome. But I hate hamburger menus. Hamburger Menu is the synonym for poor usability. Now I start Elisa Music Player for the first time and what do I see: Two hamburger menus. Why two hamburger menus? Why can’t I use e.g. the Global Menu for the content of the Hamburger Menu? It’s not that bad but it doesn’t fit to KDE Plasma. It is the same crap as under Gnome.
How to add a SMB share to Elisa?
With DigiKam this doesn’t seem to work either?
Enough criticism.
Many great improvements. KDE Plasma is evolving! Nice to see.
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