Lotsa good stuff this week, so let’s just jump right in:
New Features
KDE apps have taken their first step towards saving volatile state data (e.g window size and position) in a separate config file from the one that stores explicitly configurable settings! Dolphin now does this, and others will be ported soon (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.88 with Dolphin 21.12)
In the Plasma Wayland session, Spectacle now has the “Active Window” mode that it has in the X11 session (Vlad Zahorodnii, Spectacle 21.12 with Plasma 5.24)
Breeze folders now respect your color scheme’s “Selection” color or your specified Accent color! (Andreas Kainz, Frameworks 5.88):
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
Dolphin no longer crashes when you use its context menu to archive some files, but then cancel the job in the middle using the notification that appears to show you progress information (David Edmundson, Ark 21.08.3)
Dragging a screenshot from Spectacle into another app no longer causes the dragged preview to become comically enormous when it is much bigger in one dimension than it is in the other (Antonio Prcela, Spectacle 21.12)
Filelight now uses a multi-threaded filesystem scanning algorithm, which should result in much faster scan performance (Martin Tobias Holmedahl Sandsmark, Filelight 21.12)
People using certain NVIDIA GPUs should no longer experience the horrific graphical glitching that started happening after the Plasma 5.23 upgrade (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23.2)
When you open an executable file on the desktop, what happens next now respects your preference set in Dolphin’s settings window (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.23.2)
Selecting an item in the Clipboard widget using the Enter key no longer moves it to the second position instead of the first (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.23.2)
In the Plasma Wayland session, the specified keyboard repeat rate setting is now respected (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.23.2)
The refresh rate for all your monitors is now shown correctly even in exotic cases like multiple screens where one of them uses FreeSync (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.23.2)
KRunner can now always be closed with a single press of the Escape key (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.23.2)
In the Plasma X11 session, dragging favorites icons in Kickoff no longer causes them to bunch up and overlap. We are trying to figure out why a different problem is still happening in the Wayland session. Help would be appreciated (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.23.2.1)
Right-clicking on the System Tray icon for a GTK app no longer causes all hell to break loose (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.23.3)
Desktop items with emblems in the bottom-right corner (like the “I’m a symlink” emblem) no longer show two slightly-differently-sized emblems, one stacked on top of the other (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.23.3)
Applying any change in System Settings’ Keyboard page no longer resets the Num Lock setting to its default value (Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.23.3)
The back button in System Settings’ subcategory column header is now triggerable with a touchscreen and a stylus (David Redondo, Plasma 5.23.3)
In the Plasma Wayland session, Firefox is now more responsive to dragged-and-dropped files (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23.3)
In the Plasma Wayland session, the panel auto-hide animation now works properly (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.23.3)
Task Manager tooltips for large number of open windows for the same app are now significantly faster to load and much more responsive (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24)
When the Task Manager is set up to show tooltips when clicking on a grouped task, the tooltip no longer irritatingly changes to show a different app if your cursor happens to pass over another task on the way to the tooltip (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.24)
In the Plasma Wayland session, hiding and then showing a window’s borders no longer subtly changes the window’s height (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24)
Plasma is now a bit faster and uses less memory every time it loads an icon, which is often! (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.88)
You can now double-click on the number in a Plasma spinbox to select it, just like you can in other spinboxes (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.88)
User Interface Improvements
Spectacle’s settings window has been re-done to put more options into comboboxes, making it less huge and visually overwhelming (Antonio Prcela, Spectacle 21.12)
Editing the text of a saved clipboard history item now shows the editing view inline in a new page, rather than in a separate dialog window (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.24):
System Settings’ Touchpad page no longer shows a disabled “Device:” combobox when there is only one touchpad connected; now it is simply hidden (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24)
The Battery & Brightness applet can now show you the battery level of any Bluetooth-connected graphics tablets (Sönke Holz, Frameworks 5.88)
…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 
That text inside the clipboard editor got me. That’s deep.
Glad I haven’t faced GTK tray icon bug, it looks scary even by mere reading of its description.
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Great new features and bug fixes, thanks for that to the developers!
I noticed a few months ago that I no longer see the status in Dolphin in the status bar if a search is still running.
(I always have the current development status thanks to Gentoo Live-ebuilds).
Previously, it was always easy to see if a search was still running through Dolphin, or if the search was completed. Without this search status, it’s a bit annoying. For example, I often search for file names from a larger dataset on a network drive. It often happens that I get some files listed as search results right at the beginning of the search. Then I am tempted to think that the search is already finished and I got all search results. But in reality the search is still running and I get more results after 20-30 seconds. Unfortunately, I can’t see if the search is still running or if it has been completed.
Has this search status been removed on purpose, or is this a bug?
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Doesn’t it say “Loading…” in the main view instead?
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Yes, the main view says “Loading”. But only until the first hit(s) is found. Then the “Loading” is no longer displayed, but the first hit(s). But if the search is not finished yet, more hits could follow. And exactly about this state you are left unclear, you don’t know whether the search is finished, and possibly still further results follow.
It has happened to me several times that the first hits were displayed and I assumed that the search was finished. But the search (via a network drive) was still running in the background, and after a further waiting time, more hits were displayed.
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Hmm, I see what you mean, It does sound like a bug, yeah.
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I would rather not call it a bug. For me it is rather a conceptual error with the display of the search status.
It is preferable that results are displayed as soon as they are found. I would not like to wait until the search is completely finished until all search results are displayed. But the current form of displaying the search status (“Loading”) only allows this form.
With the previous form of the search status, when a progress bar was displayed in the status bar of Dolphin, I got both – immediately the first search results displayed and I also was informed at the same time that the search is not yet finished.
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Really cool stuff. Since the icons now can follow the color scheme, why not make the symbolic icons also follow the `ColorScheme-Text` class, same as for plasma style? That way, as i see it, there will be no requirement for dark and light variants, just one icon set.
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Already done. There is only one icon theme which switch the symbolic color.
Breeze dark icons are for apps that didn’t use the correct color.
If you use breeze icons and breeze plasma and breeze app theme, you can switch the color theme and everything will respect that.
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It’s been like this for many years. 🙂
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Some great changes and fixes.
Guess just a matter of time until plasma theme will also take in account accents, if it doesn’t already :3
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Yep, that’ll happen too. Keep an eye on https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444043.
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Hi Nate, please let me ask: is there any way to keep using the Breeze Qt style from Plasma 5.22 in 5.23?
Thank you.
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Compile the Plasma/5.22 branch of breeze from source (https://invent.kde.org/plasma/breeze)
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Okay, thank you!
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Exactly, the Breeze style from Plasma 5.22 looks better to me. Perhaps it’s worth bringing it back with a new name (e.g. Breeze Classic)?
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please 🥺? https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=442688
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Nate, are you THE “TechPaladin”? 😀
Looking to donate via (sidebar) Paypal, but just want to be sure I’ll be donating to you.
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Yeah that’s me! That was the name of a small business I used to run many years ago. I converted my Paypal account to a business account, and it stuck around that way after I closed the business down.
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Good to know! 🙂 Thx!
Well Nate ma man,
Keep up the good work!
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The icon following the color scheme is nice, it was a little weird without it. Will it be possible to assign a color for each folder in dolphin like mac os finder ?
When i see “graphical glitch”, i remember this video https://youtu.be/MaDCiS8m37Q but it’s not related (still funny)
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Yes, you can already to that, in fact. 🙂 You change the icon from the folder’s Properties window.
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Nate, do you know if a change to the Kmail icon is planned? I ask because especially with the Breeze it is really not very visible, quite strange to choose an icon like this on a theme like Breeze.
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I’m not aware of any work on this.
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Hi,
I was just wondering… Any news regarding a fix to the blurry fonts in some apps (XWayland?) in a Wayland session for HiDPI screens scaling on 200%? Apps like Slack, oXygen XML Editor (my daily XML development IDE written in Java) and others are just too blurry to be usable so Wayland remains unusable for me.
Gnome 40’s Wayland implementation doesn’t appear to have these issues but I’d rather run Plasma as it’s just so much prettier, not to mention practical.
Many thanks for all your hard work!
Best regards,
Ari
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This isn’t a Plasma problem; it’s an issue with the core wayland protocol itself. I would be very surprised to hear that GNOME doesn’t suffer from this problem, but if that’s true, it’s possible that they wrote their own custom protocol to fix it which would be completely inappropriate and defeat one of the basic design goals of Wayland, which is cross-compositor interoperability.
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Ah, thanks for the quick reply! Gnome 40 really doesn’t suffer from the problem, though, and I don’t know how they do it. No amount of googling has brought me any closer to an answer.
I’ll just carry on with X11 for now, then.
Best,
Ari
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As a software guy myself, I’m all to aware that the last 5-10% ‘polish’ on a product is usually the most gruelling part. Plasma is all about the detail work, and whilst that might not grab the headlines like the shiny new things, it shows exemplary dedication to detail and craftsmanship. To all involved, I salute you.
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