Well, I know I said Plasma 5.24 was a smooth release, and it mostly has been! But nonetheless all of you have found various bugs afflicting your varied and diverse use cases, and we’ve been working hard to fix them this week. Some very important multi-monitor fixes and long-term improvements also landed which should be welcome for people with often-docked laptops.
15-Minute Bugs Resolved
Current number of bugs: 80, down from 83. Current list of bugs
You will no longer see an unnecessary “Connection Activated” notification right after you log in (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.2)
Mappings of desktops and panels in multi-screen setups should now be much more robust since invalid screen entries won’t be added to it under certain circumstances anymore (Plasma 5.24.3, Marco Martin)
Fixed one of the most common cases of Plasma crashing on launch in the Plasma Wayland session when you have a multi-monitor setup (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.25)
New Features
Skanpage now lets you share scanned documents (including multi-page PDFs) using the standard KDE sharing system (Alexander Stippich, Skanpage 22.04). If you haven’t checked out Skanpage yet, give it a whirl. It’s really nice!
You can now change your user avatar to be a plain abstract “user” icon in front of a colored background of your choice (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25):
Added a bunch of new web search queries (Thiago Sueto, Frameworks 5.92). If you don’t know about KRunner’s web search capabilities, you can learn about it here!
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
Using Ark to extract Zip archives with empty folders no longer causes those folders to have their “last accessed” dates set to sometime in the future (Albert Astals Cid, Ark 21.12.3)
Ark can now successfully create multi-part 7zip archives whose individual parts are each under 1Mb (Max Brazhnikov, Ark 21.12.3)
Kate once again always jumps to the previously-open tab when the current tab is closed (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 22.04)
Dolphin’s main view now handles right-to-left languages properly (Jan Blackquill, Dolphin 22.04)
Fixed a visual glitch in Dolphin’s main view that could be triggered by zooming (Eugene Popov, Dolphin 22.04)
In the Plasma Wayland session, fixed one of the ways that KWin could crash when you enable a disabled external monitor (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.2)
System Settings no longer sometimes crashes when you change a monitor’s refresh rate (Marek Beleščiak, Plasma 5.24.2)
Fixed one of the ways that Plasma could crash when undocking a docked laptop (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.2)
Fixed another way your panel could disappear when screens are added, removed, or wake up from sleep (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.24.2)
Deleting a non-active user in System Settings’ Users page no longer causes the UI to break (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.24.2)
When using Panel Spacer applets to center another applet on a panel, it no longer flickers and wobbles around when one of the applets on the other side of either of the spacers changes in size (Martin Seher, Plasma 5.24.2)
The Virtual Desktop Pager applet no longer lets app icons visually overflow the space they are contained within when used on a short panel, and now shows window outlines correctly when you’re using Qt scaling on X11 (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.2)
Fixed a big recent regression in multi-monitor+multi-GPU setups in the Plasma Wayland session (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.3)
Right-clicking on a System Tray app icon no longer causes the right-clicked app to get activated when left-clicking other Task Manager items (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.24.3)
You can once again apply changes to System Settings’ Touchpad page (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.24.3)
The plasma_session process no longer leaks a bunch of memory (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24.3)
Adjusting the backlight of your screen now always works when using certain types of multi-GPU systems (Xingang Li, Plasma 5.24.3)
Discover no longer occasionally displays app or firmware text styling incorrectly (Tobias Fella, Plasma 5.24.3)
File dialogs are now faster to open when their initial view is a network location (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.24.3)
System Settings’ Firewall page no longer always tells you that the default policy is “Allow” regardless of what the system’s actual default policy is (Lucas Biaggi, Plasma 5.25)
In the Plasma Wayland session, launching DBus-activatable GTK3 apps now works (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.92)
User Interface Improvements
Elisa’s playlist has been mostly rewritten to use standard Kirigami components which fixes multiple bugs such as touch scrolling being broken and rearranging playlist songs being unreliable, halves the number of lines of code, simplifies the implementation, and improves the presentation (Tranter Madi, Elisa 22.04):
Kate’s quick search bar (invoked with Ctrl+F) no longer replaces the status bar while it’s visible (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 22.04)
Added tooltips and exhaustive expanded help text to Gwenview’s “Fit” and “Show Thumbnails” buttons (Felix Ernst, Gwenview 22.04)
Your name no longer gets elided on the login screen when it’s more than about 11 characters long and there is more than one user account on the system (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.3)
When you’re using offline updates, and an offline update has failed to complete, and Discover shows you a notification with the option to “Repair System”, clicking on that button now provides you some feedback about what it’s doing, and also tells you when the repair operation succeeds or fails ( Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)
Discover now shows a message in the app when you are running an old unsupported version of your distro, and bugs you to upgrade (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)
Breeze-themed tab bars now have better contrast with dark color schemes (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25):
Kirigami FormLayout section headers are now bold, to make them visually stand out from the content in their sections (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.92):
…And everything else
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 more news from other KDE contributors.
How You Can Help
Please consider donating to UNICEF or another reputable relief organization working to provide humanitarian aid right now in Ukraine, where several prominent KDE contributors live–not to mention 43 million other people who have suddenly found themselves in a warzone. When the world is on fire, always be a helper.
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 
Thank you Nate and all. As a long time KDE user your weekly emails detailing so many changes and wonderful attention to detail are always encouraging to see. Plasma has become more and more refined each week and I am truly grateful! Just wanted you and all the devs to know that!
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Aww, thanks!
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I wish for those avatar icons to be vectorial and not blurry like the previous letters avatars.
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> Added a bunch of new web search queries (Thiago Sueto, Frameworks 5.92). If you don’t know about KRunner’s web search capabilities, you can learn about it here!
Having seen the blog post and learning from the linked MR that there apparently is also support for DuckDuckGo’s bang syntax (nice!) I thought I’d file a related report: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=450819
Also I just noticed that the Help button in the Web Search Keywords KCM doesn’t lead to a valid help page, so one less opportunity to find out. 😉
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Works for me, so maybe you’re missing documentation packages somehow?
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Ah, I didn’t have khelpcenter/kdoctools installed, since I usually feel informed enough by following along development. 😅 Even still, the Web Shortcuts documentation also doesn’t mention anything about bang syntax and seems to have been written a while ago, opening with reference to Konqueror, which to me doesn’t feel like the most useful point in this context.
What I saw previously must be the fallback then when khelpcenter isn’t installed, that is opening https://docs.kde.org/index.php?branch=stable5&language=en_US&application=kcontrol5/webshortcuts&path=index.html in the browser which is an error page (“The branch stable5 is not available for the specified application/language.”) – there is a link to https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kio/kcontrol5/webshortcuts/index.html, but I missed this at first, given the prominence of the red border above.
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Yes, the documentation for that page is quite old and could stand to be updated. Good contribution opportunity 😉
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The new contrast for light and dark color schemes looks nice, but seems like the tab seperation (small vertical line between tabs) gone missing or hard to see.
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Hey Nate, I’ve been accompanying all the “internet connection notification” debacle and I have to say, you and all KDE devs are really something else. To be open to change something so small but that nonetheless was so annoying to people and do it that fast?! Wow!
It’s been a pleasure using Plasma since I made my permanent switch. I used to rotate a bunch of DEs every time one of them updated (Cinnamon, Xfce, Gnome, etc), but now more them ever I’m a proud user of Plasma.
The gauge that I have for the improvement is that back in the day I used to have to change a bunch of settings in order to be able to properly use the desktop when using Plasma and install a couple of themes and icons. But nowadays except for “touch to click” and “double click” I don’t have to change nothing. I just install it and I’m good to go! I even switched to Wayland and have had zero issues. Again, thanks for all your hard work and don’t let the haters and naysayers taint your work! Cheers from Brazil!
P.S: All my family also switched to Plasma! Even my mother in law!
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This Steam Deck reviewer had a nice experience, installing apps through Discover (54:15):
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Amazing fixes on multi-screen area!!!
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“When you’re using offline updates, and an offline update has failed to complete, and Discover shows you a notification with the option to “Repair System”, clicking on that button now provides you some feedback about what it’s doing, and also tells you when the repair operation succeeds or fails ( Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)”
Very handy and much needed.
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I notice with offline updates, it will not apply the update until you restart the PC, meaning it needs to be restarted twice for this to be successful. This is quite annoying as it effectively doubles the boot time (especially for LUKS users who have to enter the passphrase twice).
On Fedora, the GNOME version apparently installs updates when it shuts down, so that the next time the PC is started, the updates are all applied. Would be nice to have this baked into the KDE version, but I’m not sure who to report to. Another advantage may be, allow the computer to shut down, but install the updates during shut down. Next morning you turn the PC on the updates are all installed and ready to go.
Who would be the best to report this issue to?
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Sorry to clarify with GNOME, apparently, the updates are applied all when shutting down so the updated system is ready to go next time the system is started.
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Already reported at https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=436928
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Hi Nate !
Just wanted to let you know that some recent KDE Neon updates failed (on all my 3 Neon machines) and required to manually execute “sudo dpkg –configure -a” and “sudo apt -f install” in a terminal otherwise all subsequent updates would fail (even when choosing in discover “repair system” which actually failed and locks apt).
Regarding updates in general in KDE Neon, the other issue is older kernels don’t get removed even when using autoremove, which makes updates crawl after several months / years and might saturate the boot partition.
Apart from that : several years with no breakage at all 🙂 Incredible improvements in updates reliability !!
best regards
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Well that sucks. Please report it to the Neon packagers here: https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=neon
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Hi, I just discovered a bug in Dolphin (I think) right now in practice by pure chance, I report it here trying to be as clear as possible since I have no way to possibly answer questions or compile bug reports, I’m leaving now for a period of medical therapy and I will be away from any devices for some time;
First of all I give you my current configuration: openSUSE Tumbleweed, Kde Plasma 5.24.2, Gear 21.12.2, Framework 5.91;
The problem: If in Dolphin you create a new folder in a directory, and then create a file (I tried text) with the same name always in the same directory, the procedure is interrupted because “a file with the same name already exists”, even if, in fact, it is a folder; The problem is also present in the opposite way, creating first the file and then a folder with the same name;
Hope this was helpful, greetings!
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