This week in KDE: gazillions of bugfixes

This Week in KDE 4 Minutes

…Including many for the Plasma Wayland session! It’s finally reaching stability. I’m using it myself as a daily driver now. At this point my biggest annoyances are all with 3rd-party apps, not any KDE software. I know it’s taken a while, but I think we’re very nearly there!

Anyway, check out the full list:

New Features

When you click the Apply button in System Settings’ Display Configuration page, it now offers to revert any changed settings that could result in brokenness, and does so automatically in 30 seconds to handle the case where the new settings are so messed up that you can’t even see anything (Chris Rizzitello and Zixing Liu, Plasma 5.23):

In the Plasma Wayland session, it is now possible to adjust the Intel GPU driver’s Broadcast RGB settings (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.23)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Renaming a file or folder that matches the current filter text in Dolphin now causes the file or folder to correctly disappear from view when its new name no longer matches the filter text (Eugene Popov, Dolphin 21.08.1)

Dolphin no longer crashes if you try to do something crazy like make the trash entry in the Places panel point to /dev/null, or otherwise edit any entry to point to a location that does not technically or actually exist (Jan Paul Batrina, Dolphin 21.12)

Dolphin no longer sometimes fails to open the terminal app when you use its “Open in Terminal” action (me: Nate Graham, 21.12, though I have encouraged distros to cherry-pick it to 21.08)

Icons for remote folders in Dolphin now always have the correct icon (Méven Car, Dolphin 21.12)

Removable devices, discs, and SD cards once again appear as expected in the Disks & Devices applet after being unplugged and then re-plugged (Fabio Bas, Plasma 5.23)

In the Plasma Wayland session, you can now drag-and-drop stuff between native Wayland and XWayland apps! (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23)

In the Plasma Wayland session, it’s now possible to change the screen resolution when run in a virtual machine (Méven Car, Plasma 5.23)

In the Plasma Wayland session, virtual desktops are now remembered on a per-activity basis (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23)

In System Monitor and the Plasma applets of the same name, the “GPU Usage” sensor is no longer incorrectly represented as always being 100% full, “Total Disk Space” is no longer incorrectly computed when there are encrypted disks present, and the “Uptime” sensor no longer disappears after Plasma is restarted (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23)

Notifications sent by Flatpak’d apps are now correctly identified with the sending app (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.23)

The Plasma wallpaper chooser no longer displays a cut-off placeholder label when there are no wallpapers in any of the configured search locations (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23)

In System Settings’ Users page, the list item for your user no longer looks weird if you haven’t filled in a real name (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23)

System Monitor and the Plasma applets of the same name now discover more AMD GPU sensor data (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23)

Fixed multiple issues affecting NVIDIAs GPU users in a Plasma Wayland session, such as windows failing to update their content after being resized and KRunner never showing any search results (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.86)

Currency conversion in KRunner and Kickoff (e.g, type “500 USD” or “500 JPY in EUR”) now works again (Andreas Cord-Landwehr, Frameworks 5.86)

System Tray applets with expandable list items are now fully interactive when using a stylus and no longer sometimes bizarrely exhibit overlapping content when there is enough stuff in the popup to make it scrollable (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.86)

Applications launched from a global shortcut now appear as expected in System Monitor’s “Applications” page (David Redondo and Nikos Chantziaras, Frameworks 5.86)

Kirigami-using apps are now significantly faster to launch (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.86)

There is now a default keyboard shortcut to open the “Configure keyboard shortcuts” window: Ctrl+Alt+Comma. Yo dawg, I heard you like keyboard shortcuts… (Someone going by the pseudonym “empeyreal one”, Frameworks 5.86)

In the Plasma Wayland Session, images copied from Spectacle now appear correctly (Jan Blackquill, Qt 6.2 or Qt 5.15.3 with the KDE patch collection)

User Interface Improvements

Double-clicking on the splitter in Dolphin’s split view now resets it to the middle (Eugene Popov, Dolphin 21.12)

Konsole no longer confuses you by letting you try to edit the read-only built-in profile; instead the menu item to do so now says “Create new Profile” and takes you to the place where you can make a new profile (Ahmad Samir, Konsole 21.12)

In the Plasma Wayland session, dragging a file over another window no longer immediately raises that window; there’s now a delay like there is in the X11 session (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.22.5)

When using offline updates (the style of update where everything is applied on the next reboot), Discover no longer irritatingly and aggressively asks you to reboot, since you can safely take your time about it (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23)

System Settings’ Audio page now integrates all of the few functions of the configure page into the relevant items of the main view that they affect, making them easier to access and removing a sub-page (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.23):

Folder View icons /icons on the desktop now wrap their text at CamelCase word boundaries, like Dolphin’s icon view does (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.23):

The background blur effect is no longer so grainy on Wayland (Tatsuyuki Ishi, Plasma 5.23)

System Tray popups with expandable list items are now much improved in their visual consistency, scroll responsiveness, keyboard navigability, and overall stability (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.86)

Throughout various QtQuick-based software, buttons that are showing both an icon and text no longer display a redundant tooltip that duplicates the button’s text; now they only show this when the button’s text has been auto-hidden due to space constraints (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.86)

…And everything else

Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.

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.

Published by Nate

Published

52 thoughts on “This week in KDE: gazillions of bugfixes”

  1. Lots of improvements! Thank you guys.
    That bug about opening terminal in Dolphin was affected me few days ago. I came here in hope of seeing that being fixed! lol
    Thank you for fixing that.

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  4. Exciting updates, thanks Nate. But oh how I long to see the blog with “No more stuttering on NVIDIA proprietary drivers!”

    I guess its complicated issue partly hidden behind NVIDIAs closed doors though.

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  5. Hi Nate, this is awesome work. I really enjoy the look of Plasma on Wayland, the font and icon rendering is a delight. And even more I am enjoying the ability to put my Notebook FHD screen on 110% while scaling my 4k 28″ on 125% – almost pixel perfect window size on both screens.

    However, this setup crashes a lot. Most of the time I am working wit a Jetbrains Java IDE (XWayland, still, however they have plans to solve this by end of this year) and I suspect it’s related to that. My feeling is that opening a popup (autocompletion and so on) is always happening just in the moment of the crash.

    How can I Help to get this fixed? What kind of log would be useful to get this sorted out?

    By the way: the papercuts (misplaced popups, flickering tooltips, jumping windows on move) were vastly reduced by avoiding this setup:
    https://imgur.com/d2afdb68-1c3f-4022-a37c-7c760037c7ea
    and having both screens at y=0.

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    2. You can submit a bug report with a backtrace of the crash. Sounds like it’s the whole session crashing? In that case the crashing process will be kwin_wayland. You can get a backtrace of the last kwin_wayland crash by typing `coredumpctl debug kwin_wayland` in a terminal and then enter `bt` in the prompt when it comes up. Copy-and-paste that into a bug report here: https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=kwin

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    3. Do I have to enable some debug flag before? It keeps saying “No match found.” also, `coredumpctl list` gives “No coredumps found.”

      (Fedora 34 btw, intel UHD graphics)

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    6. If there’s no crash (as in segfault), then it would be good to look in the journal for that time period (journalctl).

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    1. Firefox has a native Wayland version on any distro, not just Fedora, provided it’s recent enough. Typing this from Firefox Wayland on Neon.

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    2. Firefox already has native Wayland functionality, it’s just experimental and not enabled by default yet. I turn it on manually by setting `MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1` in my ~/.bash_profile file.

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    6. Thanks for telling me about this directory.
      However, the native Wayland backend of Firefox doesn’t seem to work that well yet, because copy/cut/paste does not use the system clipboard.

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    7. It should use Klipper. This works for me–at least with current git master software. I know a lot of clipboard fixes have been merged for Plasma 5.23, which has not been released yet.

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    8. That’s good to hear – hopefully it will work with Plasma 5.23 then!
      Do you remember whether you also had copy/paste issues with Firefox Wayland at the time of Plasma 5.22?

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    10. The MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND environment variable has no effect on Firefox on X11; all it does it enable the native Wayland support when in a Wayland session.

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    1. You’re welcome!

      What do you mean by “calibrate” exactly? I’ve got a touchscreen and I’ve never felt like anything was off-kilter about it. What’s the problem you’re experiencing?

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    2. Hi Nate,

      I have a Panasonic Toughbook at my disposal with a touch screen. On Windows and on X11 I can calibrate it using either Panasonic’s touch screen calibrator (Windows) or xinput_calibrator (X11), but no such feature exists with Wayland it seems.

      The issue I am facing is this: if I touch the screen, the cursor doesn’t go to exactly the spot I touched, but rather to somewhere close by. By calibrating the screen (usually the software presents a screen with dots where I touch the screen), it now means the points I touch will be accurately reflected.

      This is important particularly for using the stylus since it’s meant to precisely point the cursor or draw something free-handed (I can use the stylus like a pen).

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  8. > Including many for the Plasma Wayland session! It’s finally reaching stability. I’m using it myself as a daily driver now. At this point my biggest annoyances are all with 3rd-party apps, not any KDE software. I know it’s taken a while, but I think we’re very nearly there!

    I use KDE Neon Testing with a Wayland session only, and I have to say that it’s vastly improved over the last month or so. My mayor annoyance is plasmashell crashing when connecting an external display, thought it doesn’t always happen anymore as it used to, it still does, but at least it now takes less time to recover(used to be like 2-3 mins or so, now it’s around 10-15 secs, still annoying, but an improvement nonetheless)I usually just switch to the external display, and plasma crashes on the external, however, I’ve noticed that if I choose to “join” displays instead, it doesn’t, then I can switch without having plasma crashing :). There’s one thing I’ve been having lately, like for a couple of weeks or so. Whenever I extract a compressed file using the context menu in dolphin, once it’s been extracted a new dolphin’s windows pops up, one would think it should open a new window with the resulting folder from the decompression, but it doesn’t, it’s just the same folder the compressed file is in, i.e. Downloads. Should I file a bug on this? Since I’ve no idea what’s causing this, I’ve already checked everywhere and there isn’t any option enabled about “opening a new window” or something like that. Last but not least, I really want to say thank you for all of your(KDE team)work and effort.

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    2. Thanks for your reply. Good to know! 🙂 Hope it’s get ported to 21.08.2. I’ve been wanting to ask you this: in a previous post, someone asked you what distro you used, and you said that you use openSUSE Tumbleweed, if I recall correctly, also, you mentioned using a script to compile Plasma from source, so If you don’t mind me asking, any chance you could share that script?

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    4. Thank you! I’m going to have some fun with this in a VM 🙂 Sorry to keep bothering, but there’s something else I’d like to ask, in KDE Neon Testing with Wayland, when I switch to the external display/monitor, the laptop’s goes white and bright, any idea why is that? Unlike in X where it just turns off/deactivates itself. Is this a known issue or something? I’ve been searching all the web for this, but haven’t found anything, so far. I might be using the wrong search terms though, “Plasma Wayland white and bright screen”, but this returns nothing. I even got a “Nuclear Science Abstracts” amongst results lol https://books.google.co.ve/books?id=QUhpRA1qILEC&pg=RA14-PA51&lpg=RA14-PA51&dq=Plasma+wayland+white+and+bright+screen&source=bl&ots=tfz43n1vic&sig=ACfU3U3JvX2KKhOA8ABnwNjxYn504d-Gtw&hl=es&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjR-IiGt-nyAhX1sDEKHWBaAcEQ6AF6BAgoEAM#v=onepage&q=Plasma%20wayland%20white%20and%20bright%20screen&f=false

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    5. I have always liked Fedora for Gnome. However, I have found that I prefer KDE Plasma. And since I thought KDE Plasma support is not good in Fedora (just a spin) I never looked at it. I will change that and install Fedora as a test.

      At the moment some users including me have lost trust in Apple and are more interested in Linux. I noticed that my macOS tags on a Samba file share were not copied by Dolphin. Tags and therefore Xattr are important to me. I’ve also seen you go after this in the past as well. Any news on the topic?

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    1. Judging from the latest comments, at least one KDE developer can no longer reproduce the issue in Plasma 5.23 so… maybe very soon?

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    1. I would guess it requires a package of some sort that comes from the distro to function, and maybe openSUSE Tumbleweed has that package installed by default or makes it available, while on Neon is it either not installed by default or not even available at all. But that’s just a guess. 🙂

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    1. Go to global themes > colors, and edit the theme, .i.e. breeze, by clicking in the pencil icon, in the options tab, move the slider to the minimum side, click ok, then click apply. However, this doesn’t seem to be persistent across reboots, but only for the current session, or at least that’s the case for me in KDE Neon Testing.

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    2. Ok, I just found out that this “hack” doesn’t work anymore; after changing the settings it works, but then it reverts, and the 3d shadow reappears 😦

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    4. “Dirty shadows” I’d searched for 3d shadows with no results lol Man, some bugs do have really weird names lol Have you ever thought of establishing some kind of “bug names’ convention” or something like that? Or is there already one I’m not aware of? It’d be easier to find them in bugs.kde. Just a thought 🙂

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    6. Yes, it is indeed a bit subjective. You mean this one https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=439408 ? Well, since I noticed the settings in colorscheme could affect that, by changing the level of 3d shadowing to the minimum(no shadows just doesn’t work), I guess 3D shadows should be at least part of the name, maybe something like “3D shadows settings in colorscheme broken”. I might be wrong, though.

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    7. Well there’s nothing 3D about the shadows; everything there is on a 2D plane. The problem is that the shadow drawing engine uses the wrong images; if gives yo a left edge shadow when it should display a right edge shadow, for example.

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  13. Finally! *Dancing*
    “Removable devices, discs, and SD cards once again appear as expected in the Disks & Devices applet after being unplugged and then re-plugged” – this was a salt in my eye!

    A some time ago, when moving my OS to a different SSD, I needed to create an image of that drive on an external drive. Pluging in the external drive triggered auto-mount, which was unusable for the system image (created by clonezilla), so I had to unmount it but then… I couldn’t mount it back. It was crazy! I had to wipe all my mount settings to work-around this. I love auto-mount but because of this irritating Plasma’s behavior, auto-mount became an enemy instead of friend. Now, when re-plugging comes back again, the world and auto-mount function will be right again 😉

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    1. That slider has nothing to do with Plasma window shadows, and probably needs to be changes anyway as that usage of “3D” is pretty archaic.

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    2. Oh, you’re right, my bad. Got lost in translation; in Spanish(Sombreado de marcos y efectos de iluminación) I was reading that as something to do with shadows, but in English is “frame shading and lighting effects”, is that correct? Sorry for the misunderstanding. This makes me think that maybe a “naming convention” isn’t needed, but rather some knowledge on some terminology, so we can choose accurate words that describe as good as possible the problems/issues when reporting bugs. Does that make sense?

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