Merry Christmas (or should I say Khristmas?) for those of you celebrating it today! And we have quite a few very nice presents for all of KDE’s good boys and girls:
New Features
Samba printer browsing! (Harald Sitter, print-manager 22.04):
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
Yakuake’s window is now faster to appear (Jan Blackquill, Yakuake 21.12.1)
In the Plasma Wayland session, Yakuake no longer appears underneath a top panel (Tranter Madi, Yakuake 22.04)
Partition Manager no longer keeps asking for authentication over and over again if you cancel the authentication prompt, and instead shows you a friendly message indicating what the problem is and how you can fix it (Alessio Bonfiglio, Partition Manager 22.04):
Fixed a memory leak in Notifications (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.9)
The Digital Clock’s calendar view now always shows the right colors when using the Breeze Light Plasma theme, or any other theme that has hardcoded light colors (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.23.5)
Plasma now shuts down faster by no longer accepting new connections after it’s begun the shutdown process, which particularly helps when using KDE Connect (Tomasz Lemeich, Plasma 5.24)
System Settings pages that require authentication when clicking the “Apply” button no longer display half-cut-off text under their name when using the default Sidebar mode (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24)
The new “Set as Wallpaper” context menu item now only changes the wallpapers of the desktops in the current Activity, not all Activities (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24)
The link modification UI of the Properties dialog now shows the correct information in the correct places (Aleksei Nikiforov, 5.90)
User Interface Improvements
The “Cover Switch” and “Flip Switch” effects are now back, newly written in QML for easier extensibility in the future! (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.24)
The Desktop context menu’s “Open in Dolphin” item has been replaced with “Configure Display Settings” by default (Ezike Ebuka and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24):
You can now drag a panel from anywhere on its Edit Mode toolbar, not just from a tiny button. And this is now more obvious with the addition of a label that indicates it (Björn Feber, Plasma 5.24):
The screen layout OSD now indicates screens’ scale factors in it (Méven Carl, Plasma 5.24)
When sending or receiving a file via Bluetooth, a system notification is now always shown, rather than only being shown if the transfer takes more than 500ms (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.24)
The Bluetooth applet now calls a phone a phone (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.24):
Separator lines in Breeze-themed menus once again have a bit of vertical padding to them (Luke Horwell, Plasma 5.24)
System Settings pages that display a single big grid or list now have a more modern frameless style (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.90)
Toolbar buttons that you can click-and-hold to show a menu will now also show that menu when you right-click them (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.90)
…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 
Good stuff! Hopefully that notifications memory leak will do the trick for me, because it tends to freeze plasma quite often when I take more screenshots in a row…
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Happy Khristmas Nate.
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And congratulations for the hard work!
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Happy to see Set as Wallpaper fixed so fast, it seems it was definetely possible from the beginning; if you are open to upstream more Service Menus here there are the ones I made and I think the “rotate/flip images” and “quick backup” would be useful to most users: https://store.kde.org/c/1305526
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Oh a lot of those look super useful! Yes I think it would make a lot of sense to upstream at least the image rotators and possibly the format converters too.
Not so sure about the quick backup one though as that seems a bit more technical and esoteric. If that was upstreamed into dolphin-plugins I might advocate for it to be off by default.
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Those are cool, but should they really be enabled by default? Seems like the right button menu already tries to do too much. IMO, it would be fine to have it as an option off by default
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+1 on converter. It has potential to save a lot of time.
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“ Before you ask, yes, this UI is pretty dated. It will eventually be re-done as a part of the ongoing port of all System Settings pages to QtQuick.”
It still looks very modern and clean compared to the Windows settings UIs from XP era… you know this OS made by this Multi Trillionaire company…
Good job. KDE feels more and more polished. That’s really appreciated.
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Same here. I find the current Settings interface perfectly functional and easy to work with, and good on the eyes. “Modern” has come to mean excess whitespace and tiny icons, and a loss of usability.
Must say I am thrilled to see the printer improvements (now maybe it’ll agree to notice the network printers…)
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If you say Khristmas the Katholics will be furious. They kannot take a joce.
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See comment bellow 😉
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Sure we can!!! XP
Happy Khristmas, Nate!!!
I’m pretty sure they use Plasma thru all HR in heaven (starting right in St.Peters reception gate… So you better use it too. LOL).
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Well Happy Holidays or Merry “Khristmas” to you and all KDE/open source developers who work hard to make cool software!
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Thanks for a more “more modern frameless style”. One down but many more to go. I got so peeved with the look of the window and panel frames in Dolphin and Kate that I installed Manjaro/Gnome for the first time ever! It looks amazingly clean and uncluttered and is way more flexible than I thought possible, especially via its Layouts extension. Yeah, so that experiment last all of 24 hours before I reinstalled Manjaro/KDE 😉
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Finally, Yakuake fixes are landing. It is the only blocker for me to shift in Wayland.
Touch edge to open is crucial for me. Thanks!
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> Fixed a memory leak in Notifications (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.9)
The MR was opened by Kai not David! 🙂
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Never mind, hadn’t seen the cherries 😛
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Is there a chance that graphic tablets configuration utility (kcm_wacom) finally gets some love and finally makes starts working with Wayland session?
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Lack of Wacom pen tablet support in Plasma 5 Wayland is definitely a major blocker for me.
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Unfortunately that KCM is very X11-specific so it needs to be pretty much rewritten from scratch. Thankfully this has already begun and a very basic drawing tablet KCM is already included in the upcoming Plasma 5.24 release.
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Merry Christmas Nate! Merry Christmas KDE team!
I’ve recently installed KDE Neon on my work Laptop and try to use it daily without rebooting in Windows.
My thoughts:
Linux is still not there yet, some productivity issues and quirks are still present. But it’s getting there.
For mail, web browsing and simple stuff it’s awesome with the productivity sometimes better than Windows( middle click copy and paste, selective keyboard etc).
The real struggle is when you have to use a 3rd party app( eg. Arduino IDE) with a sketch on a network NAS storage.try it… it sucks.
But I’m confident that in a few releases things will get better.
I’m really excited about the desktop cube. In the days of Compiz I’ve managed to convince some users to install Linux because of that .
I’m really happy about this blog. It’s a way of interacting with the KDE team and we feel our opinions are heard ! ( Unlike other DE’s)
Keep up the good work KDE team!
And Kudos! You deserve it!
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You’re very welcome!
Is the kio-fuse daemon not running? It is supposed to improve this exact use case, and it’s working well for me with a Samba share on my living room media PC. Please file a bug report about this issue.
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Merry Christmas.
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Nate, how about a post on how you use Kate as IDE for developing KDE projects? I still haven’t been able to figure out how to use the Kate’s projects, as well as the Build and Debug plugins.
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I pretty much just use Kate as a text editor for individual files, and do all my compiling and debugging and running from a terminal using CLI tools.
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Why not KDevelop/QtCreator/VSCode something else?
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I don’t have any complaints about my current setup. Why switch if I’m happy and productive with what I have?
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Interesting. At first I haven’t even noticed any difference between old system settings layout and new frameless one. Had to compare them one more time.
Didn’t expect it could be a concern for somebody.
However I’ve discovered lately that I am not alone who dislike the way regional (time, date, etc) settings are displayed. I wasn’t a fan of KDE4 but I think it had many things done right back in the day, probably inherited from KDE3, but anyway.
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Another thing I remember is that it had a nice GUI for controlling user groups, kwin had could merge various windows into one with tabs right in the title bar. So many goodies got lost on the way…
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Hello. I just wanted to comment and say that I’ve been using Plasma on EndeavourOS for a weeks now on my new PC I put together, and I’ve found the Plasma Wayland session to be very usable. I had to install it myself, but aside from a few quirks, it’s been a surprisingly nice experience. At this rate, it might be hard for me to go back to using anything X11-based.
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Indeed, me too! This was the year the Plasma Wayland session became broadly usable IMO.
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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Thanks for all the hard work!
Next year will be incredible for the Linux experience.
* PipeWire will mature (finally out-of-the-box professional audio in Linux)
* Wayland will mature for KDE
With Windows comparable productivity of KDE and apps like Krita, Blender, Kdenlive, MPV etc., Linux is getting closer to replace MacOS and Windows for daily users.
However, while the applications above a competitive to their alternatives (Photoshop, Maja etc.), “world domination” for Linux currently won’t be possible due to LibreOffice. To understand why, we need to study Microsoft’s success, and their path to “world domination” was primarily thanks to MS Excel! Not Photoshop, not Adobe Premier, not 3D studio max etc., but MS Excel. This is understandable, since Excel is the software which almost all industries need; Farmers, Banks, Manufacturing, Hospitals, Governmental Agencies, Engineering (of all forms) etc., basically all industries relies heavily on MS Excel. We even need it for personal use. LibreOffice Calc is not even remotely close to the productivity of MS Excel, and I cannot even switch my primary private laptop to Linux, because LibreOffice Calc results in a too large productivity drop. LibreOffice Calc hasn’t either really progressed the last decade, indicating that it lacks the management/resources/will to improve, and thus might effectively be the primary anchor preventing Linux from gaining any noticeable market shares.
So I believe the main strategy for Linux to gain “world domination” must soon involve a change of focus from everything else to the Office applications. We cannot convince industries to switch when the core of their productivity (office) is worse on Linux.
With that said, thanks for all the outstanding work! You guys have been absolutely incredible this year!
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I largely agree that apps are the next frontier because desktop shells are maybe not perfect, but already good enough.
Distros need to get better too IMO. The projects that run their own distro and DE like Linux Mint and ElementaryOS already have an edge here and I think the general purpose distros and DEs need to steps up their/our integration game.
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A bit late but Merry Khristmas KDE ❤
'Fixed a memory leak in Notifications (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.9)'
Does this apply to Plasma 5.23.x/5.24? I looked at the bug/commit but couldn't figure it out.
'The “Cover Switch” and “Flip Switch” effects are now back, newly written in QML for easier extensibility in the future! (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.24)'
Thank you Ismael and everyone who worked on this one! \o/
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Yay! he “Cover Switch” and “Flip Switch” effects are now back! I can’t wait for this. I miss them so much. I can’t get use for the plain grid or other switchers. The chosen window is never properly shows, so I’m not sure where I am, and it takes time to realize what am I seeing. With those old effects back, I finally get that at the first glance recognition!
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