This week in KDE: Elisa grows up

This week I want to highlight something big: Elisa now has a full mobile interface, making it a first-class citizen on Plasma Mobile and Android! A ton of of the code is shared, thanks to KDE’s Kirigami user interface toolkit. Thanks very much to Devin Lin for this enormously impactful contribution that makes Elisa a fully convergent music player!

In addition we got a lot of work done on the new Plasma System monitor app, which is going to replace the venerable KSysguard by default in Plasma 5.22. It’s currently optional, so we’re very thankful for the amount of testing that adventurous people have done with it. This promises to make the full-roll out in Plasma 5.22 much smoother. Thank you everyone!

Other New Features

Kate now has a feature to let you jump back to the previous cursor position (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.04):

You are now notified and asked to back up your data when problems with your disk are detected that do not quite rise to the level of a full S.M.A.R.T failure, but are nonetheless worrying and could potentially cause data loss soon (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.22)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Konsole no longer crashes if you close a tab and then immediately use the “Bookmark all tabs as folder” action (Carlos Alves, Konsole 21.04)

Elisa can now play AAC files (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 21.04)

When Dolphin is sorting by on-disk sizes, it no longer orders folders first when not asked to do so (Méven Car, Dolphin 21.04)

When you tell Gwenview to open a set of files that includes any files which happen to have the same name, it no longer somewhat terrifyingly shows an overwrite dialog prompting you to delete one of them which freezes and becomes non-interactive anyway (Méven Car, Gwenview 21.04)

Spectacle no longer inappropriately enables “on click” mode under certain circumstances (Vlad Zahorodnii, Spectacle 21.04)

Fixed a case where the new Plasma System Monitor app could crash on Wayland (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.21.3)

The “Force Font DPI” setting is once again usable on Wayland, so those of you who were using it to work around Wayland’s blurry fractional scaling can do so again (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21.3)

Changing the settings of any of the System Monitor widgets now always results in the Apply button being enabled (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21.3)

The “Amount of history to keep” setting in system monitor widgets and the new app now works (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.21.3)

Moving a widget within a page in the new Plasma System Monitor app now works (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.21.3)

The new Plasma System Monitor app now remembers its filter text if you switch away from the filtered view and then go back (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.21.3)

Text in table columns in the new Plasma System Monitor app is now always properly vertically aligned no matter what font settings you use (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.3)

The new Plasma System Monitor app’s “Quit Application” dialog no longer mis-renders its checkbox when using certain fonts (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21.3)

Spectacle’s “Rectangular Region” mode once again works in the Plasma Wayland session (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.22)

When using Dropbox and setting its System Tray item to be “always hidden”, it now remembers this state after the computer is rebooted (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.22)

For apps which live in the System Tray and change the contents of their context menus, those menus are now properly displayed in the Plasma X11 session (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.22)

The Flickr picture of the day wallpaper now stores its API key in a central location so that it can be updated as needed, without people having to wait for updates to their software (Yunhe Guo, Plasma 5.22)

Fixed a case where System Settings could crash while installing new themes (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.81)

File dialogs now add the correct filename extension while saving in the particular case when the document’s filename already ends with a period (Robert Hoffman, Frameworks 5.81)

Headsets with an integrated “Play/Pause” button now do what you expect every time that button is pressed, not only every second time (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.81)

Panel margins no longer change when compositing is disabled (Niccolò Venerandi, Frameworks 5.81)

User Interface Improvements

Konsole once again exposes the default profile in the UI, for those of you who missed it (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 21.04)

Okular’s support for FictionBook files has been enhanced to support <annotation> and <subtitle> tags (Yuri Chornoivan, Okular 21.04)

You can now set a keyboard repeat rate higher than 50 key events per second; the new maximum is 100 (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21.3)

After moving or copying a file, the notification now indicates which app will open the file if you click on the “Open” button (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.22):

The checkbox in the Bluetooth System Tray applet to disable Bluetooth can now be used to enable it again as well (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.22)

The Plasma Vaults applet now offers a standalone “Show in File Manager” action that you can activate for open vaults to easily jump right there (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

Using Discover to update your Nvidia drivers (or any other packages with a license agreement) no longer prompts you to re-accept the license agreement unless it has actually changed (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.22)

Sticky Note widgets now ask for confirmation when you try to delete a note, but only when the note has real content in it–not when it’s empty or when you just created it from clipboard content (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.22):

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The new Plasma System Monitor app now remembers the way you left your table columns and sidebars when you quit and re-launch it (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.22)

All of the Breeze icons that depict locked or unlocked states now follow the same visual convention of locked icons having a filled body and unlocked icons having a hollow body (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.81):

Web presence

Check out episode four of Niccolò’s series on how to create a Plasma theme:

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.