We have put the finishing touches on Plasma 5.24 and started to work on 5.25 stuff, with two big improvements already merged: keyboard navigation for Panels, and the start of Discover’s UI redesign! Check those out below:
15-Minute Bugs Resolved
Current number of bugs: 83, same as last week. Current list of bugs
Plasma, Discover, and many other apps no longer sometimes always crash on launch when you’ve turned on User Feedback sharing (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KUserFeedback 1.1.0)
Changing user properties in the System Settings’ accounts page once again works if you happen to have version 22.04.64 or newer of the AccountsService package (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.24)
Discover no longer sometimes randomly freezes when you’re looking at an app’s details (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.1)
Other Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
Gwenview is once again able to open RAW files, at the cost of sometimes being unable to open files that have the wrong filename extension. A patch that fixed that but broke RAW support was reverted (me: Nate Graham, Gwenview 22.12.2)
Dolphin no longer crashes when you cancel an archiving job in the middle that was initiated from one of Dolphin’s context menu “Compress” items (Méven Car, Ark 21.12.3)
When browsing an FTP server in Dolphin, opening files once again opens them in the correct app rather than your web browser (Nicolas Fella, Dolphin 21.12.3)
In the Plasma Wayland session, Kate no longer flashes when you hit Ctrl+S to save your changes (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 22.04)
The NOAA Picture of the Day wallpaper now works again (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24)
In the Plasma Wayland session, dragging-and-dropping various things to XWayland apps no longer sometimes makes them stop accepting clicks until the system is restarted (David Redondo, Plasma 5.24)
Spectacle’s Rectangular Region overlay now appears above all full screen windows, not just some of them (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.24)
Network and System information display in System Monitor now always works every time you open it after logging in, not just sometimes only working the first time you open it (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.24)
System Monitor bar chart bars no longer disappear when you make the chart really narrow (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.24)
When dragging-and-dropping items onto the desktop, now all of them are placed at the dragged location, rather than only one of them being placed there there and all the other ones being placed after other icons (Severin Von Wnuck, Plasma 5.24)
Discover no longer crashes when you install or uninstall more than one Flatpak apps at once (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24)
Discover now shows the correct size for very very large packages (Jonas Knarbakk, Discover 5.24)
In the Plasma X11 session, using 30-bit color now works (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24)
The System Tray’s popup now has the correct background color when the widget is located on the desktop rather than on a panel (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.24.1)
System Monitor CPU sensors can no longer ever briefly display negative values (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.24.1)
Discover’s screenshots popup is no longer overlapped by the sidebar after you resize the window to be small and then big again (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.24.1)
The Battery & Brightness applet no longer inappropriately shows the “Low Battery” icon when the only batteries present are from external wireless devices with an adequate charge level (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)
KIO no longer inappropriately tries and fails to handle non-file-based URLs registered to apps (e.g. tg:// for Telegram or mailto:// for your email client) when the apps advertise that they accept URLs (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.91)
KWin’s keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Alt+Tab) no longer sometimes break after KWin is restarted (Vlad Zahorodnii, Frameworks 5.91)
QtQuick-based apps are now slightly faster to load and run just in a general sense (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.91)
When using a dark color scheme, the Breeze icon for the KDE Plasma logo no longer partially disappears at large sizes (Gabriel Karlsson, Frameworks 5.91)
Fixed a couple of inconsistencies and glitches in various Breeze folder and mimetype icons (Gabriel Karlsson, Frameworks 5.91)
User Interface Improvements
You can now drag tabs from one Kate to another (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 22.04)
Okular’s Bookmarks sidebar page now has an improved UI, with buttons that have text and an “Add Bookmark” context menu item (me: Nate Graham, Okular 22.04):
Dolphin’s Information Panel now shows “Dimensions” by default instead of separate “Image width” and “Image height” fields (Méven Car, Dolphin 22.04)
When compressing multiple files from Dolphin’s context menu, the menu now tells you the name of the resulting archive (Fushan Wen, Ark 22.04)
You can now find Konsole by searching for “cmd” or “command prompt” (Someone going by the pseudonym “M B”, Konsole 22.04)
When searching for System Settings pages, exact title matches are now weighted much more heavily (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24)
You can no longer use Discover to uninstall itself (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24)
Discover’s App page has been redesigned for greater aesthetics and usability (me: Nate Graham and Manuel Jésus de la Fuente, Plasma 5.25):
You can now use the new default Meta+Alt+P shortcut to cycle keyboard focus between your panels and activate applets with the Keyboard (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)
The clipboard applet’s settings window is now much more comprehensible (Jonathan Marten, Plasma 5.25)
Searching for “switch user” no longer finds an item named “New Session”; it is now called “Switch User”, as you would expect (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25)
…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
If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!
Otherwise, 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 
KDE rocks! \m/ ❤
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Best okular example ever seen, congrats for building the good old Lego supercar. A lot of kids from the 90s dreamt of it, including myself 🙂
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I actually saved up for years and bought it for myself as a kid. So much fun.
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“You can no longer use Discover to uninstall itself (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24)”
Nate the Avengers wish they had this so Thanos wouldn’t have used the stones to destroy the stones. All kidding aside, this was one busy week. You guys have been squashing bugs left and right. Awesome work and thank you.
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Each time I tried KDE something felt off and I think what’s that – Icons in the sidebar in couple of applications (Settings and Discovery being most notable examples). Virtually everything in KDE uses awesome monochromatic icons except those two places and… it looks odd. And if you add the horizontal lines it really diminishes the aesthetics…
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And there’s so many existing icon packs that have just that
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Yeah… let’s not focus on the defaults (and all the efforts to make Breeze nice)… because there are so much alternatives that you can toy with all day long.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s awesome that you can customize KDE to your needs and there are definitely users that do that but from my observations of TypicalUsers they usually don’t change anything.
And hence my comment to improve defautls…
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This 30bit fix.
I wonder if it’s a fix for nvidia drivers in 30bit as well.
The only issue was non-transparent panels and so on (some things with transparency worked and some things didn’t, with qtcurve, it’s been a while since I last tried..).
If not, not a huge deal it’s always been broken.
If so though it would be a pretty big deal lol… 😀
The Okular updates seem nice too.
When you have huge files to read through, could be nice to have that bookmark feature.
So cool beans.
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I’ve been trying out Plasma 5.24 and it’s been very nice to have the activities screen! That being said, it seems that I can’t get it to bind on Meta key, meanwhile Kickoff and application menu is rather special in that Alt+F1 binds it to Meta as well. Could this be done for any other bindings, as to remove the need for stuff like ksuperkey?
Much love!
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The removal of “Prevent empty clipboard” option from Clipboard applets settings is nice. I thought keeping it on would keep at least one entry in the history even on clearing all and disabled it. Then I was troubled to find after closing apps copies will be gone. Looking at the comments by @tomz on the MR now I understand why.
I don’t think anyone would have ever used that option. And if it is actually needed it should be provided with a text like “don’t turn it off if you don’t know what you are doing…” 🙂
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Great to see the love given to Klipper, it’s something that I use every single day and it’s one of the unsung features that make the Plasma desktop so productive for me.
“You can no longer use Discover to uninstall itself”… besides my initial lol! moment, this is a great thing to have because when I first got into Kubuntu back in 2008, I was unsure of how strong or brittle the system was. I once accidentally uninstalled the whole desktop set of packages and was like okay what do I do now?
“In the Plasma X11 session, using 30-bit color now works”… nice work!
“Discover’s App page has been redesigned for greater aesthetics and usability”… wow, looks great!!
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Thanks so much!
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hello, I think i have a 15 minute bugs candidate :
In dolphin, if you want to delete a file too big to go in the trash, you are warn that the file is too big to go in the trash, but that all no solution. So if you don’t know that maj+supp is the solution, you are force to make a rm from the shell.
As always good work
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Shift + Del ?
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There is something about “software centers” in general i don’t like all that much. Some of the issues i have is the overwhelming feeling when opening one. So many options in front of you and by default and most of the time none of them does anything meaningful for me. More like seeing spam. In the end i do the task i came for by using a search bar or to do it in the terminal. And such experience is much more pleasant for me. The only GUI application that somehow worked for me in the past was Synaptic package manager.
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Also Muon, the best package manager from Kubuntu.
As for software centres, yes, usually they are overwhelmingly “bloated” with stuff an experienced user doesn’t need and surprisingly uninformative when it comes to detailed output what’s going on during operations with software packages. However, they are designed that way for noobs and noobies. It’s better to have such app in order to meet an average noob’s expectations. More experienced people can use search field or even ditch such centre in favour of cli or GUI package manager.
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I just quickly tested Elisa on the latest daily Kubuntu build, on an old laptop with a 1280×800 resolution. There were sliders on the bottom of all three UI elements that are not resizeable sideways. https://images2.imgbox.com/c7/03/pAV0vLot_o.png
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Also:
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Most of those are already fixed in newer versions, and I just pushed a workaround for the scrollbar issue.
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It’s a Qt issue. Most distros are shipping a patch for it. Evidently Kubuntu isn’t.
https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-83890
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I see. Let’s hope Kubuntu fixes that then, it’s a very visible glitch…
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I’m already using Plasma 5.24, great!
It would be nice to update the breeze gtk theme to have consistent close buttons, when you are not using decorations, for example Firefox, the X always has a black background color and shouldn’t have that.
Greetings to the whole community and thanks for the fantastic work. https://i.imgur.com/jBDa5gb.png
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I just upgraded to Plasma 5.24 (on KDE Neon) and for some reason it uninstalled kwin-x11, leaving me with no window controls and almost all apps crashed, thankfully I still got access to the app launcher, opened the Konsole and installed it again, then restarted and the issue got fixed.
Another issue is that I can’t enter the desktop effects setting anymore, it just crashes with a segfault.
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This is a blog, not a bug tracker. Can you please report the bug using https://bugs.kde.org? Thanks!
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Here’s a hurtful comment that helps nobody: A wallpaper is a very big part of first impressions. Just because a wallpaper was created by a known and respected artist, took a long time to finish and was live streamed while doing so, does not make it good. I would never ship a distro with that thing. There, I said it.
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Aesthetics are objective, but so far the response to the new wallpaper has been overwhelmingly positive, so I guess it’s a good thing you’re not in charge of anything. Since evidently you don’t like the new wallpaper, you’re more than welcome to change it to something you do like.
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