This week brings several exciting and long-awaited changes, including KHamburgerMenu in Okular, Primary Monitor on Wayland, and Centered window placement by default! Read on to find out the details:
New Features
Okular has now adopted KHamburgerMenu, so you can now hide the menubar for a slim, modern look without losing access to any features! Note that in Okular this is not on by default; you have to manually hide the menubar first. (Felix Ernst, Okular 21.12):
In the Plasma Wayland session, we have implemented the concept of the “primary monitor”, and it does the same thing on Wayland as it does in the X11 session (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
Okular no longer crashes when opening a Markdown file containing any images with alt text that are inside links (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 21.12)
Ark now correctly handles zip files whose internal metadata uses backslashes as path separators (Albert Astals Cid, Ark 21.12)
In the Plasma Wayland session, Yakuake’s “Keep window open when it loses focus” setting now works (Firlaev-Hans Fiete, Yakuake, 21.12)
Fixed a random KWin crash (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.23.3)
In the Plasma Wayland session, a few glitches in KWin’s adaptive sync support have been fixed (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.23.3)
You can once again activate items in Kickoff using a stylus/graphics tablet pen (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.23.3)
The new Wayland-compatible keyboard layout System Tray applet is no longer missing the Esperanto flag (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.23.3)
When your battery is at a critically low level and Plasma notifies you about it, the notification now goes away automatically when you plug in the power cord (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.23.4)
The Media Frame applet now supports displaying images from folders whose names contain unusual characters such as backticks (Patrick Northon, Plasma 5.23.4)
In the Plasma Wayland session, it is now possible to run an XWayland app as a different user (Weng Xuetian, Plasma 5.23.4)
On the System Settings Display & Monitor page, text in the “revert this change” dialog no longer gets cut off when using a language with long words like German or Brazilian Portuguese (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.23.4)
Fixed a case where the Plasma Wayland session could crash on logout (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24)
When not using the systemd startup feature, Plasma now properly cleans up after itself on logout, terminating all processes that it launched as expected (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24)
When clicking the “Check for Updates” button in Discover while only the Flatpak backend is active, it now appears to do something (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24)
Searching for cities in the Weather applet using the BBC UK Met search provider should now be more reliable (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.24)
In the Plasma Wayland session, Plasma OSDs showing things like the current volume and brightness levels no longer inappropriately respect KWin’s Maximized window placement policy, so they don’t end up huge when using that policy (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.89)
In the Plasma Wayland session, clicking on the hamburger menu button of a QtWidgets app like Dolphin or Gwenview or Okular while its window is unfocused no longer causes the menu to appear as a standalone window (Felix Ernst, Frameworks 5.89)
In System Settings and Info Center, the title rows of QtQuick-based pages no longer oddly fade in as they load (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.89)
The KCommandBar no longer shows empty space on the right side (Eugene Popov, Frameworks 5.89)
User Interface Improvements
Newly-opened windows are now placed in the center of the screen by default (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24)
App list items in Discover now have a more attractive and logical layout (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24):
Hopefully this should address some of the complaints about Discover in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzdEHrPbYiE
In the wallpaper chooser, previews now use the same aspect ratio as the screen whose wallpaper you’re choosing, so the preview will be visually accurate (Iaroslav Sheveliuk, Plasma 5.24):
The Display Configuration applet no longer has three configure buttons (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24)
The Battery & Brightness applet now shows the battery status of more devices, including more types of Bluetooth devices in particular (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.89)
The KCommandBar now shows a placeholder message when your search returned no results (Eugene Popov, Frameworks 5.89)
…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 
>>In the Plasma Wayland session, we have re-introduced the concept of the “primary monitor” (because Wayland itself has no such concept on its own), and it does the same thing on Wayland as it does in the X11 session (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24)
It seems that I know what kind of superpower KDE Plasma devs possess. It’s a power to make you eagerly crave for the next Plasma release before you have settled with the most recent one 😉
Bravo guys!
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What can I add… I’m back to building from master!
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My mind was blown when somebody told me that Wayland has no concept of primary monitor. Thank you for fixing it anyway!
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> When not using the systemd startup feature, Plasma now properly cleans up after itself on logout, terminating all processes that it launched as expected (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24)
> Note this MR is to be back-ported to 5.23.
Would you however recommend the systemd startup in general or for whom is it recommended?
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In general, yes. It fixes a lot of bugs. Fedora KDE has enabled it by default since Fedora 34.
See also http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/plasma-and-the-systemd-startup
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Is the cube animation back or the 3d app switcher?
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New Flip Switch and Cover Switch effects are currently under review: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kdeplasma-addons/-/merge_requests/91
Desktop Cube should be after that.
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Really loving the recent changes and direction of KDE Plasma – it’s a seriously great job and I use it on my work and personal machines.
Wayland progress in particular is looking promising! Once Chrome Progressive Web Apps work properly with the task switcher, I’ll move over to it as my daily driver – the security and multi-monitor aspects make it too compelling.
Keep up the good work – your weekly roundup is something I look forward to every Saturday morning!
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Thanks!
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Centered window placement. FINALLY. Thank you. This was the number one stupid default setting ever, among single-click to open and a million huge tooltip windows all over the taskbar. Slowly, very slowly, but surely I am getting what I want out of the box. I believe the superfugly folder icons are being overhauled as well..? I hope someone removes the childish 3-4 small tilted preview windows on the folders too, to ONE big nice preview, which would look amazing while browsing through my music collection if every folder would have the album cover which I have painstakingly added to every folder during these last 20 years… Windows 11 removed that feature so here’s your chance to shine, KDE.
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Absolutely agree about the centered window placement. One less config to change on a new install.
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Oh another one: splash screen. Get rid of it. The whole functionality. Yes, I can choose to show a black screen but that’s not the point. The point being: there’s two splash screens. First the one by the distro and then another one by KDE, where you can choose from a wonderful selection of splash screens that were last updated ages ago. In my happyhappy laalaa-land there would be no splash screens at all, just a little moment of darkness and BOOM, desktop. Does anyone know what commands to use to completely remove BOTH from KDE Neon, without affecting the system in any way?
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Hi, i’am running Plasma on Fedora (currently 5.23.2) and noticed, that blue ocean theme is not everywhere. It is missing in breeze-gtk, and more importantly also in plasmoids…..is it something that is not yet complete and will be fixed, or should i file a bug to fedora packages? I’ve no idea what is expected state now…
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The style comes to the Breeze Plasma theme with Frameworks 5.88, which was released today. It hasn’t made it fully to GTK apps yet; that’s still a TODO.
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I noticed that some GTK apps (GNOME Web) do not have rounded corners. Is this a GTK 4 thing? Thes ones that do have rounded corners are (and I am pretty sure) GTK 3 apps.
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No idea, sorry.
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Hi Nate, this is what I mean. Rhythmbox has rounded corners, but GNOME Web (Epiphany browser) does not. GNOME Web I believe is GTK 4 app, while Rhythmbox to my knowledge is still GTK 3.
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“Newly-opened windows are now placed in the center of the screen by default”.
Finally.
Next: “Newly-opened windows now remember their previously defined size”.
Let’s hope that it is not necessary to wait another three years to understand that it’s something that should be available by default.
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On X11, KDE app windows already do. It’s not possible to implement this generally for all windows on X11, though. It will only be possible on Wayland, and this is being worked on.
If you want this to happen faster, maybe you can help out with it?
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The Hamburger Menu really needs an Exit entry at the bottom. A lot of people hide the titlebar, especialy when maximised.
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That’s not a bad idea. We could make it appear only when the window titlebar has been hidden. Can you file a bug report requesting that?
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@Nate: I switched to wayland month ago, and I’m happy, because plasma wayland session became usable ~week ago (doesn’t crash every 15min, like before 😉
It’s generally usable, after switching dock I had hard time switching resolution (you cannot call ‘DISPLAY=:0 xrandr –auto), because it defaulted to 1920x1080p for some reason on 1920×1200 monitor, but it has been probably fixed two days ago.
From two weeks Firefox crashes only after OOM killer, and from two days Konsole doesn’t crash on every suspend-resume cycle (like before 😉
About Plasma bugs, tooltips got white, not transparent corners(space after rounded corners). It’s really minor annoyance for me, I would even prefer rectangular one.
So why Plasma is technically in better state under your ruling, UX changes in those time usually sucks. I feel more and more disappointed how it all looks and behaves. It’s harder and less intuitive to find anything. Dolphin looks like some frankenstein(explorer.exe, konqueror, nautilus or older dolphin looked way better. I really hate what it bacome recently)
New big, scroll toolbars looks really ugly.
‘Accent Color’ is nice idea, but not ideally executed(it should impact folder colors, etc. at least in Breeze and Oxygen theme). And as you said, it was always available (color schemes), but it’s still not as user friendly as Windows 95/98/2000). So it really sucks that UX technology regressed so much, from Windows 9.x times (while I hated this systems for stability, I really liked it’s customization ability and 16bit consistent icons. I was amazed by KDE 2.x, Gnome 1.x and fluxbox abilities later. But while Gnome hi-color theme were nice too, windows 98se hi-color icons were really iconic)
Nobody is interested in porting Wacom Tablet tooling from X11, but it’s not important for me(but can be for some, especially for multi-monitor users, where tablet area is spread across all displays[so proportions are multiple ways off)
SDL2 is pretty fast with wayland backend (and SDL1 apps, using SDL2 compatibility layer). But using X11(default) backend really sucks for performance. But it’s not Plasma fault (but it’s important for people switcing to Wayland).
So while Plasma/wayland is ready for most folks, it’s still a regression in many areas (performance or graphic work/tablet) and doesn’t provide real advantages over X11
SDDM still doesn’t contain wayland support in stable/default builds.
BTW, do you know if release of Plasma 5.24 is planned soon? I know there is schedule, but SteamDeck is delayed (to February), Valve is big Linux player(including wine and Mesa development), and SteamDeck’s users can dominate KDE Plasma userbase soon. I guess that Valve got some business arrangement with KDE, because it’s success depends on KDE Plasma state. But maybe you signed some cyr^H^H^HNDA 😉
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Here’s the Plasma release schedule: https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_5#Future_releases
I’m not aware of any kind of business arrangement between KDE itself and Valve.
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>>New big, scroll toolbars looks really ugly
I have right the opposite opinion on Breeze. Finally it looks modern and kool.
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Will admin or root elevation prompts also launch centered? At the moment they can appear any where
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Yep!
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Good job on the improvements. GNOME user here salivating at all the updates recently.
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Come to the dark side… we have cookies
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Regarding KHamburgerMenu, I don’t it is necessary to count the menu like “for n more actions”. So disturbing. “More Actions” looks leaner and cleaner
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Yeah, you’re probably right. Can you file a bug report about this? Thanks!
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“Newly-opened windows are now placed in the center of the screen by default”
THANK YOU! I filed a bug for this years ago and was rebuffed saying that it was up to the distros as to how they would want their defaults. I believe this is for the best as a default setting.
Otherwise, lots of great stuff here, great to hear!
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I guess feelings have changed. My proposal sailed through review with nary a negative comment, which I was definitely not expecting! Looks like the time was right.
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Hi Nate, I’m curious why do hamburger menus have their content flowing out of the context window? Is it an issue with Qt or the framework?
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Just typical Qt menu positioning behavior
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Is it something that’s being worked upon, or is it not a major concern as of now?
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Not to my knowledge. In general this is a nice thing, as you don’t want the menu to get cut off for small windows. However it isn’t ideal for a large menu on the far-right side of a small window.
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