Rejoice all, for the infamous “Korners” bug has been fixed! This issue caused 3rd-party window decoration themes with rounded corners to display a square blur area when using burred backgrounds. Themes are now able to (and must) specify a mask graphic that will clip the blur area to the visible area of the window decorations. Thanks to Michail Vourlakos for implementing this fix in Plasma 5.25!
But that’s not all in the Big Deal department, for Kate and other KTextEditor-based apps finally have multi-cursor support! You can create multiple cursors in three ways:
Alt+Clickin different places to add new cursors there- Press
Alt+Ctrl+up/downto add new cursors on lines above or below the current one - Select multiple lines of text and press
Alt+Shift+Ito put a cursor on each one
Thanks so much to Waqar Ahmed for this amazing work, which will be in Frameworks 5.93!
15-Minute Bugs
Current number of bugs: 81, same as last week. Current list of bugs
Other New Features
Okular now opens to a welcome screen when you launch it without a document (Jiří Wolker, Okular 22.04):
On System Settings’ Shortcuts page, you can now assign global shortcuts to launch arbitrary commands and script files, as well as just apps (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.25)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
Dolphin and various other places once again show thumbnails for Krita (.kra) image files (Alexander Lohnau, Dolphin 22.04)
Kate’s settings window is no longer too big to fit in small screens; it is now able to scroll in such a situation (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 22.04)
All of Elisa’s shortcuts now always work no matter which language you are using it in (Olivier Trichet, Elisa 22.04)
When Elisa is configured to minimize to the System Tray when its main window is closed, clicking on its tray icon now raises the window to the front as well (Olivier Trichet, Elisa 22.04)
Inline “Save” buttons embedded inside PDF documents now work in Okular (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 22.04)
In Gwenview, shortcuts for “go to next” and “go to previous” no longer stop working once you reach a video file (Elliot Lester, Gwenview 22.04)
System Settings no longer sometimes crashes when you switch between Sidebar and Icons view (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.24.3)
The icon size popup in System Settings’ Icons page once again has the correct size (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.24.3)
In the Plasma Wayland session, when you have entered the Desktop Grid effect with a four-finger swipe up gesture, you can now exit it with a four-finger swipe down gesture, and the animation is a bit smoother too (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.24.4)
In the Plasma Wayland session, the “RGB Range” feature no longer sometimes randomly gets confused and disables itself (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24.4)
In the Plasma Wayland session, sharing/recording/streaming your screen no longer sometimes results in the image being inappropriately rotated 180 degrees (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)
Items downloadable through the “Get new [thing]” system that contain files with TAR archives whose mime types evaluate to “x-tar” can now be downloaded and used (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.93)
A variety of Kirigami list items now display their inline buttons properly when using a right-to-left language (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.93)
Day/month/year in calendar applets are now always visible when using 3rd-party Plasma themes that have opaque selection effects (Ivan Čukić, Frameworks 5.93)
In the Plasma X11 session, “Get new [thing]” windows now have a close button in their titlebar (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.93)
User Interface Improvements
Elisa’s playlist item buttons now collapse into a menu when there’s not enough room to show them (Tranter Madi, Elisa 22.04):
Items in Elisa’s left sidebar now become thicker in Tablet Mode but are thinner by default, and the view’s scrollbar no longer overlaps the icons when it is collapsed into icon mode (Tranter Madi, Me: Nate Graham, and Jack Hill, Elisa 22.04)
Elisa’s metadata window can now be closed by pressing the Escape key (Adam Hill, Elisa 22.04)
EPub files now display thumbnails (Michał Goliński, Dolphin 22.04):
In Gwenview, the left and right arrow keys now always switch between items when you’re in View mode, no matter what part of the UI has keyboard focus (me: Nate Graham, Gwenview 22.04)
Battery charge thresholds are now only shown for internal batteries, which after all are the only batteries they apply to (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.24.3)
The grid view of wallpapers is now sorted by wallpaper name, rather than semi-randomly-looking (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.24.3)
In the Plasma Wayland session the virtual keyboard now smoothly slides into place when it appears and disappears (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.25)
The clipboard applet now remembers the last type of barcode you used for the purpose of sharing clipboard items with barcodes (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.25)
On the Breeze SDDM login screen theme, changing the keyboard layout or session no longer causes the password field to lose keyboard focus (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25)
Headers of QML-based pages in System Settings really finally actually don’t flicker anymore when you switch pages (Devin Lin, Frameworks 5.93)
The Breeze Plasma style arrow graphic now looks like all other Breeze-styled arrows (Artem Grinev, Frameworks 5.93):
Web presence
We finally added the Steam Deck to https://kde.org/hardware! 🙂 (Momo Cao, right now)
The download link at https://neon.kde.org is now much more prominent (Guillherme Silva, right now)
…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
If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly! This is the second week with no 15-minute bugs resolved, and it would be nice to refocus on those. I know everyone’s busy, but they ain’t gonna fix themselves. 🙂
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 
Wonderful to see that the infamous “Korners” bug has been fixed! 🎉🎉🎉 Seeing that it was reported in 2018, it must’ve been non-trivial to fix. And now there’s that feeling again of wanting the next Plasma release… 😀
It’s so good to see continual improvements to Okular, Kate, and Gwenview; they are central, workhorse productivity apps.
LikeLiked by 3 people
KDE became amazing!
I rarely boot into windows ( just when i need a windows only program, like plc programmer etc).
But there are still bugs that needs to be addressed in order to be used by everyone.
For example, my wife boots into windows because of a annoying bug in dolphin that doesn’t pass rhe right kio link when clicking a file from a Samba share. Double clicking a video from a Samba share makes it open with the smb://url, while starting it from terminal ( for example mplayer file) pass rhe correct kio parameters.
Also, the battery icon with the percentage shown inside doesn’t change when you plug the laptop in.
Renaming a . txt file still selects the extension and deletes it when you type a new name.
It’s impossible to drag a Appimage file into the taskbar or create a shortcut without some work.
Let’s say I have a virtualbox image on the Windows partition. I cannot automount the partition at startup from right click on it or settings. Everyone I start virtualbox i need to click the partition to mount it first.
Format USB drive with right click menu its a must for beginners like my wife.. kparted or gparted? They won’t remember that
A dodgy usb cable. It makes no sound when you connect it/disconnect it. How would i know if a USB is plugged in or not? dmesg or lsusb all the time? We needs sounds on connect/disconnect usb devices🤔
Another one is running software as root. The open/save as dialogue would take you into the root home by default.. this will trow newcomers off..
These are just some of the things that needs to be addressed in order to attract newcomers.
LikeLike
Did you open tickets for theses? Some of these sound like interesting discussion points (I can offer some workarounds, especially for things that I don’t think should be features – like automatically mounting Windows partitions) or could be easily fixed (such as the remaining behaviour), but no one can fix problems they don’t know about…
LikeLiked by 2 people
I agree on some nitpicks like format a pendrive. Yesterday I needed to format a pendrive with W10 iso from Manjaro but I couldn’t, apps like IsoImageWriter or Gparted didn’t work, however it did from an already installed W10 VM (VirtualBox) and the Rufus app.
I add other desires such as:
– Dolphin in full screen mode
– Dolphin has a shortcut to create a file
– Dolphin save the tabs state after a crash or unexpected shutdown
– Dolphin – making the “Find” toolbar botton a toggle-able button
– Files on the desktop don’t change position after restart
LikeLike
Fixing Korner bug is the big deal for me!!!
LikeLiked by 2 people
> In Gwenview, shortcuts for “go to next” and “go to previous” no longer stop working once you reach a video file Thank you, Elliot Lester! That was such an annoying bug. I every time needed to close gwenview when reach the videofile when viewing video+photo contents.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Okular is just an awesome program. I use it (obviously) at home on my general purpose computer, and at work on my laptop via Windows App Store. Love it, and to see this new welcome screen with recently view document is great.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It is really great, yeah! I also have Okular on my Windows living room gaming PC.
LikeLike
The Korner bug is why I never used third party themes. Huge thanks!
LikeLike
Interesting, I for one dislike round buttons way more than the corners bug so I kinda used to live with it. But anyway I hope the dev of ClassiK theme will adapt it to the changes.
LikeLike
Only want to mention that I have been using Skanpage and it is great!
Apps like Skanpage are becoming increasingly more important since the big brands (e.g. HP) now forces the users to create online accounts in order to scan, which is a serious privacy concern since paper documents these days are primarily used for very privacy sensitive information (e.g. financial, law and health related).
I think it would be great if Skanpage made it to the Windows store.
One thing I would like though is the ability to change contrast/brightness for some few cases where the documents has some very faint signatures/stamps.
Other than that, thank you all! Outstanding work!
LikeLike
+1 Skanpage is little gem
LikeLike
What a great set of goodies! Huge thanks to Jan Blackquill for her(?) wonderful work on so many areas of KDE that coincidentally often are my major gripes with KDE.
Other are doing amazing work too, thank you all guys.
Btw Neon just got another convert from Windows as I managed to convict my elder brother to install it. Albeit some hiccups everything is good so far.
LikeLike
Nice!
One small bug I found in settings, when you toggle a switch via Alt+Key, they “Apply” Button doesn’t get enabled. If you click the same toggle with the mouse it does.
Please forgive me, but I don’t want to make an account just to report this bug I hope you can relay it
LikeLike
I just discover now thanks to this post that 4 fingers touchpad-swiping is a thing, is that configurable somewhere? Could it be made more “discoverable”?
LikeLike
I’d like to know too – this is something I miss dearly. Up to now I thought KDE simply couldn’t do that and you need other software (like Fusuma) for that. Or is this a Wayland-only thing (I’m a Nvidia hostage)? Would be really great if we finally catch up with all other players (Gnome, Win, Mac…).
LikeLike
Yes, touchpad gestures are a Wayland-only thing (as they are on GNOME too). We’re working on actively improving them, so there’ll be some good stuff in Plasma 5.25!
LikeLike
It’s not configurable anywhere yet, but it will be eventually.
LikeLike
Wouldn’t be KDE if it wasn’t 😉
Nice to hear that you’re working on it.
LikeLike
Nate, do you know how to contribute to KDE Applications? I create a MR but I am afraid no one have seen it. https://invent.kde.org/sdk/libkomparediff2/-/merge_requests/2
LikeLike
Looks like it got merged 🙂
LikeLike
if you say “Current number of bugs: 81, same as last week.” Does it mean, x bugs got fixed and x new appeared, or that nothing moved? Would be nice if you could mention in case of x>0!
LikeLike
When people fix any of them, I list them here. So this week it means “no new bugs, but also nobody fixed any of them.”
LikeLike
I randomly installed Endeavour in a VM yesterday and was surprised to see the corners bug was 100% fixed. I wasn’t sure when it happened, but good timing I guess.
LikeLike
Thank you for the multicursor support, that was one of two features I missed in Kate, the other being virtual whitespace. Could ye please add it (ye could possibly utilize some code from the block selection mode)? I would like to help, but C++ is not my field of expertise. Were ye to add it, I could leave Komodo IDE (I enabled the virtual whitespace via Scintilla scripting, but it’s very buggy).
LikeLike
https://bugs.kde.org is your friend 😉
LikeLike
Hello!
Does anybody know what happened to the header separation in notificacions?
Is it gone/reverted in Frameworks 5.92 or is it something on my end?
LikeLike