This week we worked very hard not only fixing bugs in our software, but also on triaging bugs in our venerable bug tracker, bugs.kde.org. Thanks to the coordinating efforts of Justin Zobel, the KDE BugSquad has been working harder than ever to separate the wheat from the chaff so developers can focus on what matters, rather than wading through a sea of obsolete reports and bugs that have been fixed ages ago. If this sounds like fun, please feel free to get involved! See https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging
New Features
Konsole now shows you color previews for HTML color codes! (Gustavo Carneiro, Konsole 20.12):
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
Dolphin will once again launch AppImages and other executable files (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 20.12)
Dolphin no longer sometimes crashes when closing the Terminal panel (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 20.12)
Okular no longer fails to open files whose filenames include the . and # characters in various places (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 20.12)
Text in the System Settings Autostart page is once again properly translated (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.20.4)
The Audio Volume applet pop-up no longer sometimes displays an unknown, non-functional device with the text “Device name not found” (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.20.4)
The Emoji Selector once again shows the Smilies & Emotion category (David Redondo, Plasma 5.20.4)
In the Plasma Wayland session, the titlebar context menu’s “Resize” item now works on maximized windows (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20.4)
People who had set a global shortcut for Night Color early on in its development process will now see that it works again (Michał Ziąbkowski, Plasma 5.20.4)
In the Plasma Wayland session, the current keyboard layout indicator now works (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.21)
In the Plasma Wayland session, Task Manager thumbnails for client-side-decorated windows are no longer visually clipped (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)
In the Plasma Wayland session, tapping a titlebar button with a touchscreen now makes the menu (if any) appear at the finger’s location, not at the cursor’s location (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.21)
In the Plasma Wayland session, deliberately killing XWayland no longer crashes the whole session (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)
The lock screen now resizes itself correctly to fill the whole screen after rotating a device that supports screen rotation (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)
The Calendar widget now has visible text when using a dark color scheme (Tomaz Canabrava, Plasma 5.21):
Sending multiple files to a Bluetooth device now works (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.77)
Text in the “Share…” menus throughout KDE software is now properly translated (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.77)
The menu that appears when dragging-and-dropping something on the desktop is now positioned on the correct screen when using a multi-screen setup (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.77)
The clear button inside Plasma text fields no longer overlaps long text (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.77)
Progress indicator bars in Plasma notifications no longer visually overshoot their bounds in various odd conditions (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.77)
When using Discover to perform updates that include add-ons from store.kde.org, the add-ons no longer immediately disappear the moment you click the “Update” button but rather disappear exactly when they should (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.77)
When logging out of a Plasma session, a blank session named “Unused” is no longer left behind, visible in the user switcher screen (Fabian Vogt, SDDM 0.19)
User Interface Improvements
Dolphin’s Places panel now highlights an entry only when the main view is displaying that exact entry, not any sub-folder inside it (Méven Car, Dolphin 20.12)
Table views throughout KDE apps no longer have a vertical separator line for the last column that is one pixel too thick (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.21)
The Analog Clock applet now shows the exact time in its tooltip (Tomaz Canabrava, Plasma 5.21)
KDE apps now display pretty icons for video subtitle files, TrueType font files, Math files, QEMU disk images and SquashFS images, and core dumps (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.77):
How You Can Help
In addition to bug triaging mentioned earlier, you can have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover more 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 
Will there be there live bug squashing session before 5.21 as it was before 5.20? I found it really productive. Devs fixed a lot of annoying wayland bugs with community help before release, that otherwise might have gone unnoticed.
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Yeah, we can try to do it again!
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Waking up every morning – I brew a cup of coffee. And while it is boiling, I think about two things: that I will survive the Queen of England, and that in Dolphin it will be possible to search through hidden files with baloo disabled =)
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You already can with Baloo enabled. What’s the problem keeping you from leaving it on?
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For me this is https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428416
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oof. 😦
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I’d rather survive to see a republican England after Elizabeth’s death, a “Commonwealth of Britain” where we have real democracy and the head of state is elected, not imposed. 😃😃
But in the meantime, I’d be glad to see Baloo just working fine (i. e. indexing everything one tells it to index, everything!) and able to obey to standard search syntaxes like +,-,””. I hope to live long enough… Oh, also to see a working Wayland before it becomes obsolete technology! 😂😂
JK 😜 (not totally, though)
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I am happy with plasma wayland and intel gpu.
But can i hope bugs fixes for nvidia gpu ( broken plasma themes , crashs with the driver atomic mode ..) or think about throwing away my video card (gtx 1080).
Thanks.
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Many of these issues turn out to be problems in the Nvidia driver itself. I can think of many recent examples. That driver is a huge pain in the butt on all platforms on which I’ve had the displeasure of having to use it or professionally support it. For this reason, I try to avoid Nvidia hardware, not only in a Plasma environment, but in general.
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– In the Plasma Wayland session, the current keyboard layout indicator now works (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.21)
Yeeeeeeees, thank you very much Andrey :). Related to this, just leaves the icon of Caps Lock (and similar), to be shown at the System Tray when the Caps Lock are on and when they’re off, hiden, of course, but great improvement.
Another great week here on the KDE Community/Software. Wow, a real bunch of Plasma Wayland fixes, impossible not to be happy with these terrific news. I know I’m saying this every week, but I really mean it, Plasma 5.21 is looking quite good and that makes me tremendously happy :D.
I just upgraded to Plasma Applications 20.11.90 and WOW, finally, Spectacle with annotations, I’ve been wanting that for a few years. Just one thing I miss from Flameshot, I’ll search on KDE Bugs to see if there’s a bug file already or if I have to file one myself, but it would be awesome to include 2 more buttons, Undo & Redo, that would be even more terrific :).
And maybe I’ll have to do the same, because I think I detected a bug while being on annotation mode, I tried it only a bit, but it looks like when I drawn with the pencil on a Screenshot, when I got out of the annotation mode and entered in again, there was an extra vertical space, as if the draw had increased the vertical size (being drawn since the 0 px in the y axis). That could be something, I’ll investigate a bit about it.
As always, give a huge thanks to everyone involved on this magnificent project, with tremendous and valuable work, a lot of effort and special/extra mention to Nate Graham, mate, you’re doing magnificently, I truly mean it. You, people from KDE Community, rock a lot :D.
A huge, virtual, sincere and warm hug to everyone mentioned above and hoping you’re doing great and you’re healthy, stay healthy, stay good ^^.
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Glad you’re happy! 🙂
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The first reason i switching from openbox to kde is your great report documention.
Keeo moving for this great idea and work.
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Hi Nate, I really appreciate your (and others, of course) work!
However, there’s a part of the KDE experience that really needs some love: SDDM. I know it’s actually an external project, but – at least according to the Arch Wiki – it’s the reccomended login manager for KDE, and I think it’s an important part of the package.
Just some examples of not-so-unimportant and long-standing bugs:
https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/246
(maybe not really crucial anymore given the Wayland progress, but still…)
https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/1171
https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/859
https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/514
https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/1085
(these 4 are all somewhat related, and are actually preventing me to use SDDM at all 😦 )
You may well see your login manager just once a day when you start up your machine, but it’s where everything begins!
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I’ll have a look.
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Thanks! Keep up the great work 😀
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What is the status of kcm_wacom for wayland session? Can it configure tablets yet? At least so they would work for XWayland software?
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Lots of refinements here, very nice!
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Thanks for all the updates – I really like this blog post.
Has there been any updates to plasma popup notifications? – I often see, even temporary notifications stuck piling up on the right of my screen (using 5.20.3). Or, i there a way of forcing all notifications to timeout?
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I’m not aware of these issues. Can you file a bug report?
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Good point 🙂 I’ve had a search and https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=369041 fits – I’ve updated with my current system information and linked a related bug. Would be happy to help discuss. I do have programs running in my tray/applets (e.g. Insync, https://store.kde.org/p/1313987/, etc).
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