Bit of a short list this week, but there’s much more still happening, with merge requests aplenty going through review! Plasma 5.23 is now in “soft feature freeze” and we are working hard to stabilize it for the release next month.
New Features
With Kate’s git integration enabled, you can now delete branches (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.12)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
Konsole is no longer so slow to close a tab when something is written at the prompt (Christoph Cullmann, Konsole 21.08.2)
Copying text from Okular now strips off any trailing newline characters (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 21.08.2)
Konsole’s “New Tab” menu item now works when there is only one profile, as there is by default (Nathan Sprangers, Konsole 21.12)
Skanlite now respects your chosen default image format when you go to save a file (Alexander Stippich, Skanlite 21.12)
Elisa no longer inappropriately parses HTML in song metadata text (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 21.12)
Unchecking the “Inhibit automatic sleep and screen locking” checkbox in the Battery and Brightness System Tray applet now works properly (Peifeng Yu, Plasma 5.23)
Fixed one of the ways that the ksystemstats daemon could crash on launch, which would cause System Monitor widgets to not display any data (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.23)
In the Plasma Wayland session, when the virtual keyboard has been temporarily disabled, it now stays disabled on the lock screen too (Oleg Solovyov, Plasma 5.23)
In the Plasma Wayland session, when using a multi-screen setup with one screen plugged into an AMD GPU and other ones one plugged into an Intel integrated GPU, the screens driven by the Intel GPU no longer continue to show the login screen after logging in (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.23)
“No border” and “Is closeble” KWin Window rules now automatically apply as expected, if you’ve set them to do this (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.23
System Settings pages launched as standalone windows using kcmshell5 now have the correct icon in their titlebar and Window Switcher visualization (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23)
In System Settings’ Virtual Desktops page, you can once again use the mouse to select text while editing the virtual desktop name (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23)
The desktop context menu no longer exhibits a visual glitch at the bottom when pressing the shift key to access the “permanently delete” action, including when a sub-menu is open (Derek Christ, Plasma 5.23)
In the Plasma Wayland session, shadows for Plasma dialogs, notifications, and OSDs are no longer often broken especially when using a left-edge panel (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.23)
KWin window rules now automatically apply themselves as expected after KWin crashes and restarts itself (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.23)
It is now possible to create a Plasma Vault using the gocryptfs backend when using version 2.1 of gocryptfs (Ivan Čukić, Plasma 5.23)
User Interface Improvements
Gwenview’s new behavior to preview a zoom level when you hover the cursor no longer applies the new zoom setting instantly, so if you close the combobox without selecting anything, the view snaps back to the original zoom level (Felix Ernst, Gwenview 21.12)
System Settings’ pages now have many many more keywords associated with them, so you can now find things more easily by searching for stuff in the search field (Guilherme Marçal Silva and Nayam Amarshe, Plasma 5.23)
Removing a Bluetooth device now prompts for confirmation, and the action to do so now uses a red-colored icon to hint that something will be removed (Tom Zander, Plasma 5.23)
After searching for an Emoji using the Emoji picker window, using the arrow keys now always navigates between the found emojis, rather than moving the text insertion point in the text field (Kristen McWilliam, Plasma 5.23)
…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.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Plasma 5.23 looking amazing so far. Thank you so much!
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I’ll have to dabble in this Window Rules feature, see how I can use it. It seems to be getting a lot of mention.
On another note, it would be handy to be able to calibrate my touch screen in Wayland, as I can do with X11 using xinput_calibrator.
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BTW I forgot I posted the touch screen issue on another bit on the blog and you responded. My bad, carry on!
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– The USB memory device is no longer detected in the notification area, after having removed it through the notification area tool, unplugged the same USB memory and plugged it again.
– It would be useful that the name of the file be selected without the extension in the download window during the browsing of the window’s fields by TAB and or SHIFT+TAB keys, in order to avoid to select again the name of the same file when the folder location where to put the file has been chosen.
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Could you please link the bug reports or if there aren’t any, file those? Those points seem to be valid!
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I prefer to expose my feedback here because my bug reports and suggestions are not managed. So I avoid to waste my time.
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Since I’m KDE’s primary bug triager and I see all new bug reports, it’s weird that you think I won’t see bug reports filed on bugs.kde.org, but I will see random text posted here.
Let me be clearer: File bug reports on https://bugs.kde.org because I will see them and read them and triage them accordingly. Any future comments you post to this blog that should be bug reports will be deleted. Thanks.
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So you are responsible to avoid to manage feedback for any reason. Well to know.
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First one is already fixed (mentioned last week), while the other one is an already-reported feature request.
This blog is not a bug tracker. 🙂
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Nate any of the core kwin devs have nvidia hardware? Or how many of them test on nvidia. I’m asking since more then 70% of people are using nvidia so do i. I would switch to wayland since 470 drivers support accelerated xorg but wayland for me is unusable. To many bugs to even mention.
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Your complaint would be better directed at NVidia since it is up to them whether to support Wayland or not.
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Yes, a few Plasma and KWin developers have NVIDIA hardware. Keep in mind that not all bugs affect all hardware equally. NVIDIA often supports their latest hardware a lot better than older stuff–for obvious reasons.
Also 70% of our users don’t use NVIDIA hardware. You are probably thinking of Steam’s gaming hardware survey, but that surveys Steam gamers specifically. So 70% of *Steam gamers* using NVIDIA hardware does not mean that 70% of *all* users use NVIDIA hardware. Our own data (see https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/what-we-can-learn-from-plasma-telemetry/) shows about 25% NVIDIA usage.
And yes, these are mostly bugs in the NVIDIA driver itself. You should report them to NVIDIA.
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Nvidia seems to deprecate their hardware by stopping releasing their drivers for old hardware (i’m in this peculiar situation – after 470 my hardware wont get any new updates) but tbh what you said isn’t quite true. I have gti660 that today is still supported by current driver – 9 years old card.
Even if not 70% but 25% of users are nvidia users (tbh valve’s data seem to me bit more believable sine they have a bigger sample size – but im not here to argue) well its a 1/4 of your total userbase (data from 2020) and yet You guys seem to release untested software. 5.22.4 i could log in into wayland session 5.22.5 – stuck at black screen. The only thing that’s changed is update of frameworks and kde itself.
You and I both know that in order to report things to nvidia one needs to know it’s nvidia’s fault. And to know that, those bugs have to be looked at by devs. I can’t determine that. So how to solve that conundrum?
I know nvidia is a shit company. However when i bought my hardware there was no other choice. Back then amd was worse then garbage. There is a push towards wayland but it seems like i won’t be able to use it at all. At least X11 works good 🙂
And please don’t read all i wrote as a whinging. You’all doing great work but im asking for a little more attention towards us 25% 🙂
Btw could you take a look at this bug https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=441017. No one seems to have the same issue but me.
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> […] shows about 25% NVIDIA usage
What is more relevant than the current number of Plasma users on nvidia hardware is the market share of nvidia graphics cards in general (which probably is quite high).
If support for nvidia is bad in Plasma, then you will automatically have fewer nvidia users. So this way of arguing is not particularly sophisticated.
Concerning the data on David’s blog: I’m wondering how hybrid setups with iGPU + dGPU (e. g. intel + nvidia) are counted? Do they count for both Intel and NVIDIA? I know that many laptops have such a hybrid graphics setup.
Moreover, which hardware manufacturers does “X.Org” represent in this statistic?
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FWIW NVIDIA’s share of the total market is even lower, at just 15%: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/jpr-gpu-shipments-in-q1-2021-hit-119-million-units
It’s easy to underestimate how many Intel integrated GPUs are out there and overestimate the number of gamers. But the numbers pretty conclusively show that gamers and NVIDIA users are a small minority, and the mainstream is Intel integrated GPUs.
None of this justifies neglecting NVIDIA users, of course. We do our best to fix issues affecting those folks that are within our power to fix. It’s just that our GPU-accelerated desktop exposes a lot of issues in NVIDIA’s drivers. Games do the same thing, and game makers routinely work around the bugs. NVIDIA then works around game bugs in the driver, you get a cycle of buggy code working around buggy code elsewhere. It’s an almighty mess that hurts anyone else. You don’t see the same issue in GNOME or Cinnamon or whatever because they don’t have hardware-accelerating drawing code; everything is still CPU-bound. This is one of the reasons those environments often use more CPU power and get worse battery life despite having fewer visual effects and less or no transparency and blur. GPU acceleration is a great thing, but it requires GPU drivers that work properly, so it does introduce another point of failure in the design. There are bugs in AMD and Intel’s drivers too of course, but it’s nothing like what affects NVIDIA users.
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i figured out why wayland session didnt start properly on nvidia. It seems that plasma isn’t compatible with egl-wayland 1.1.8 but works with 1.1.7. So Where to report this? You guys or should i go for nvidia’s egl-wayland?
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Looks like this is already reported: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=442241
Feel free to mark it as confirmed if you can reproduce the issue.
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Too*
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Can you add a simple Usb flash or partition formatting utility on right click in Dolphin (same like windows)? Having to install gparted for such a trivial task is terrible for a new user
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Great to hear Skanlite is getting some love 🙂
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Hi Nate,
First, congrats on everything you do!
KDE is fantastic! And your blog brings an additional value to it.
Now, back to the question/request.
Will there be anything like [https://github.com/LordAmit/Brightness],
built inside of Plasma and be controlled through settings (widget, key shortcuts, etc.) ?
Something similar to Night Color, but with which you could control the screen brightness?
In certain cases, I don’t want to activate the Night Color, but want to only control brightness (leaving the color as is).
Use case being : when I use the laptop connected to external monitor later at night, I need to manually (from monitor) decrease the brightness (and next day increase it) vs. when it would be integrated into Plasma,
I could do it with a shortcut (to increase/decrease by % or to activate a preset).
Looking forward to any kind of info.
Thx!
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You’re very welcome!
It probably makes sense to integrate that into Night color, in fact. We have an open feature request for it: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=440000. People also want the ability to use Night Color to change color schemes: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=408563.
Basically people want it to be a generic time-based trigger to change various visual effects. It seems like a reasonable and intuitive place to me for those features to live. It may happen eventually.
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Hey Nate,
If you get a ping from this comment, please check the end of the thread with LordAmit.
Much obliged! 🙂
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Hi Nate, where a bug on getting auto-switching to HDMI audio when you plug in an HDMI cable go? Is that a distro-level bug, a KDE bug, something else? (Basically I want sound output to switch to HDMI out when I plug in an HDMI cable- it works manually, and when I use a script. I’m on KDE Neon currently).
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It’s a PulseAudio quirk that it doesn’t do this by defaut; you can make it do that via an off-by-default option in the Audio Volume page in System Settings. If you use or move to a distro with PipeWire, it should work out of the box, automatically. If it doesn’t, it’s a PipeWire bug.
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Will dolphin ever have the option to format flash drive with right click, as windows has? Took me ages to convince a windows user the right way to do it is with another software (gparted for example).
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Sure, if someone contributes code for it. 🙂 See https://pointieststick.com/2020/05/18/why-dont-you-just-fix-thing-already
Here’s the relevant feature request: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=377253
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Hi! (Main) Author of Brightness Controller here. Really great to see that it is still being used and is being referenced as an example for feature requests, especially because I love the KDE environment!
Nate, not sure if you were talking about integrating the feature or integrating the app itself; but either way – please let me know if I can help in any way. 🙂
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Um, not sure why it appeared at the bottom, but I wanted it to be a comment under Matija’s comment. Sorry!
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LordAmit,
Came here looking for the link on bugs.kde.org Nate posted, to check the state of the feature.
Wasn’t aware of your comment until now, seeing it accidentaly
I think Nate and I misunderstood each other about the goal of what I was trying to say 🙂
It wasn’t about the Night Color temperature (which is a great addition nontheless!) slider, but in managing brightness.
So I’ll explain it in detail in the next comment and point him (Nate) there.
At the end, I must praise you for the work on Brightness Controller as it’s a life saver for my setup!!! 🙂
Muchos graciados man!
I sooooo wish, it was incorporated into Plasma. Fingers crossed!
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Hoping Nate will see this…
My setup is a laptop with an external monitor.
Just to mention, laptop is Huawei Matebook 14 2020 4800H,
a freakin’ great hardware matched with KDE Plasma.
Moving on, I mostly work with my laptop (closed) connected to external monitor.
All is fine and dandy during the day, when I need the brightness to go Loco in Acapulco,
but the problem starts when the dark creeps in and the monitor starts giving me +Blindness points which, amazed by the sheer beauty and UX/DX of KDE Plasma, I don’t wanna accumulate.
The crude solution is to manage the brightness via the buttons on the external display. Not user friendy, lemme tell you that.
When I use the laptop solo I can manage the brightness of the screen via the tray battery icon.
I would also like to do that when the laptop is closed, but for the external monitor/s, that is/are connected.
Far fetched, but when both laptop lid is up and an external monitor is connected,
to have 2 sliders for managing +/- brightness of displays.
Also whilst scrolling over the tray battery icon, the brightness of both displays would be controlled, instead of laptop’s, which is now the case.
LordAmit’s Brightness Controller does most of that.
Well, the colors are not important anymore, as the Night Color implemented the temperature feature, but the ones for multi-monitor brightness is missing.
The feat that you’ve linked on bugs.kde.org is concerning only the Night Color temperature, which has been resolved.
Is that kind of feature reported, worked on maybe?
Maybe I could chip in as well, for such a solution to be created…
Also, LordAmit provided his expertise and help.
Would be great if this were to be considered implementing.
Thx!
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