This week in KDE: Back to those 15-minute bugs

This Week in KDE 3 Minutes

This week we got two good 15-minute bugs fixed, with a few more in progress that have a target merge date of next week! And of course there’s a good smattering of other positive changes as well:

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 79, down from 81. Current list of bugs

All the notifications that were suppressed while you were in Do Not Disturb mode no longer flood the screen when you leave Do Not Disturb mode; instead, they just appear in the history pop-up, ready for you to read them there (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)

Folders in Recent Documents lists throughout Plasma now display their real folder icons instead of a broken-looking “unknown” icon (Méven Car, Plasma 5.25)

New Features

KRunner now has its own config window rather than re-using the systemwide search plugins page in System Settings, and in that window it now lets you disable the behavior where typing text while the desktop is focused will open it (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Ark’s “Extract here” context menu items no longer do so much unnecessary work, making Dolphin’s context menu faster to open and causing fewer hangs on network locations (Kai Uwe Broulik, Ark 22.04)

Opening a new Private window in Firefox using its Task Manager task context menu no longer sometimes opens the window with the path to your home directory in the URL field (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.24.4)

When using a Global Menu, closing the active app now clears the menubar rather than leaving its menu there as a zombie (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.24.4)

Window titlebar buttons now get reversed as expected when you’re using the system with a right-to-left language (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.24.4)

KWin’s blur effect no longer sometimes results in flickering for windows that use blurred backgrounds (Mathias Tillman, Plasma 5.24.4)

Clicking the “Launch” button in Discover to launch an app now always results in only one thing getting launched, instead of sometimes launching several things (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)

When used in right-to-left-text mode, a variety of QtQuick controls now look correct, including sliders (Jan Blackquill, Frameworks 5.93)

Showing the “Get New Widgets” window from the Widget Explorer sidebar no longer blocks/freezes the rest of Plasma until it’s closed (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.93)

User Interface Improvements

GTK applications using the Breeze-GTK theme now fully match the new appearance used in KDE apps (Jan Blackquill and Artem Grinev, Plasma 5.25)

The Plasma Wayland session’s touchpad gestures now let you reverse the direction of your fingers to cancel an in-progress gesture, when the effect in question supports it; right now only Desktop Grid does, but more are coming soon! (Eric Edlund, Plasma 5.25)

The “active job progress” notification icon in the System Tray now shows you the average completion percentage in its tooltip (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.25):

The Media Controller applet now shows a tooltip indicating the elapsed playback time when you drag the slider handle (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.25):

Lists of recent documents in Task Manager Task context menus can now contain recent things that aren’t files, such as folders and even abstract concepts like “Recent Downloads” and “Recent connections” (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.25)

Discover can now warn you about the risks of installing proprietary software (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):

This’ll appear when you click on that “What’s the risk?” link

Discover now shows you the size of installed apps and other content on its “Installed” page (Jonas Knarbakk, Plasma 5.25)

The desktop context menu has lost its “Lock Screen” and “Log Out” items, to slim it down to only what’s relevant (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25):

Of course you can add them back if you want, since this menu’s contents are configurable

…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!

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.

Published by Nate

Published

56 thoughts on “This week in KDE: Back to those 15-minute bugs”

  1. Thanks for the updates once again.
    * The desktop context menu has lost its “Lock Screen” and “Log Out” items, to slim it down to only what’s relevant.
    This one is a serious case of https://xkcd.com/1172/ but glad to see that I can get the old behavior back. For the curious, I got rid of my launcher years ago and I use krunner for everything except logging out apparently.

    I know this is not the place but just want to ask in case this is a config issue. Several application list views on wayland don’t refresh on scroll:
    KRDC
    Zanshin
    Kontact Todo
    and sometimes the file picker
    If this is a bug, should I be filing it under kwin?

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    1. lel regarding secret tooltip continuation on that comic: the updates to KDE Neon actually broke my system because of graphic driver related stuff. Managed to fix that with a lot of research and work after waiting for more updates. Tried reinstalling old driver or newer ones but I can’t manage to mine ETH anymore for over a month now, which was my main way of heating during winter or even generating income if I think about it. Now I’m considering switching distro or even moving to Gnome in order to use Fly Pie stuff because rolling release is silly (even logging out or lock-screen don’t work anymore); hardest thing is letting go of Dolphin because of colored folder icons add-on and folder thumbnail previews features…

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  2. Neat fixes. Honestly I’ve always found “Lock Screen” and “Log Out” in the menu to be rather awkward and silly. If could cause a lot of issues for people who are not very tech inclined plus they’re actions that aren’t being used too often, so using any of them by accident or try out could be rather disruptive or scary. kRunner type of people like Bugzy here can use that just fine as well for those actions rather then searching for a clear desktop to be using lamely placed UI entries. Progress ftw! 👏🏻

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    1. Agreed. In my dreamworld laa-laa-land there’s just a Shutdown button on the menu. It shuts down the computer right away, no additional alternatives or popups or timers. Shutdown. Shutting down. Not coming back. Closing. OFF. Maybe I’m weird, but that’s what a shutdown button should do, and only that. Plus, it makes the menu look clean and less scary.

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    2. Sometimes, I make mistakes. Sometimes, you make mistakes. Sometimes, everyone makes mistakes.

      Clicking the shutdown button without a way of cancelling… mmm…

      Liked by 3 people

    3. Yeah, that’s why departments stores have revolving doors too. You know, if you accidentally leave when you really didn’t want to leave? I beg to differ. If there’s just one OFF button sitting there all alone by itself hundreds of pixels away from every other thing no one will ever accidentally press it. “Hmmm, OFF, I WONDER what that button does..the pop up says turn off the computer, I WONDER what that could mean” OOOOPS. Damn, it turned off the computer. THERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN SOME SORT OF WARNING OR A REVOLVING DOOR TYPE OF SOLUTION, THIS “TURN OFF” MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL!!!!! ..to put it bluntly. I want to turn off my computer, I do not want a second opinion. If I had a dollar for every time I accidentally turned off my computer I’d have zero dollars. But sure, let’s belittle and all make fun of the guy who wants things to be straight to the point =)

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    5. Only FOUR keys? I refuse to use any keyboard shortcuts that don’t involve at least 9 fingers. Maybe I just need to find a keyboard with an OFF button..
      Slightly related: I just read on reddit, if you dismiss a pop-up notification it sure disappears right away with no chance of ever reading it again, and Nate said one just have to learn to not do that =)
      Just gonna leave this here.

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    6. For the record: I’m not enthusiastic about this change. I’m using these menu items on a daily basis: It’s just faster than having to click at the K-menu, I just have to drag the right mouse button somewhere on the free desktop and pull down over Lock or Logout in just one click. Of course, there are keybindings, but sometimes the mouse is already in my hand. This menu entries may not be logical in this place beneath literally desktop entries, but they do serve a workflow purpose there.
      It’s not obvious to me where I can configure this back to its current form.

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    7. It’s not obvious to me where I can configure this back to its current form.

      Right-click on desktop > Configure Desktop & Wallpaper > Mouse Actions > click the “Configure” button for the “Right-Button” row > configure the menu to your heart’s content. 🙂

      Liked by 1 person

    8. Ooh, that’s great, I like simplifying my context menus.Somehow I’ve only ever gone into the Configure Desktop & Wallpaper to change the wallpaper before. 😀 I was able to edit my context menu, excellent. Hmm, it is weird that the Desktop & Wallpaper screens don’t exist in System Settings. Thanks.

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    12. What do you mean by “on pending”? Did you accidentally click the “start a review” button instead of “leave a comment”? If so, you need to finish your review with a button on the bottom of the page. Or just copy the text of your pending review comment into a new non-review comment.

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  3. Elides entries in Desktop context menu doesn’t look good even though the menu name is fully present.

    Also just mentioning “Paste” intead of “Paste Clibboard Content” is much cleaner and less confusing for novice/simple users.

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  4. I really hope the address multi-monitor issues soon. I know that they are very difficult issues but it’s getting very old playing Russian roulette every time my monitors go to sleep. Will my taskbar still be there when they wake up? Or will they have disappeared into the void where all the widgets are still active and consuming memory but nowhere to be found. And all of my applications have randomly scattered themselves around

    It feels like plasma is just deciding that one of the monitors is not there because it doesn’t wake up as fast as the other one or something. I know it’s been a problem for a long long time and I doubt it’s a 15-minute bug but I hope it gets addressed soon because it’s the biggest killer for me right now especially when I want to recommend to other people

    Liked by 2 people

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    1. On Plasma 5.24.3, Frameworks 5.91, X11.. the loss of taskbar happened frequently to me with a single display. I’ve not experienced it since disabling lockscreen.

      My display still goes off for power saving after a while, but whenever I wake it with mouse the taskbar/panel is always there now 🙂

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  5. I hereby announce a new policy in KDE: Everything from Plasma 5.25 and onward shall be cherrypicked to Plasma 5.24. All of it. Yes, thank you. That is all.

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  6. The most urgent bug is Klipper, it keeps crashing my whole plasma desktop after any fast typing/deleting, I’m using it a lot everyday and this frustrates me a lot.

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  7. Hello Nate. As an Nvidia user, I have a request. Can you speak to the Nvidia developers on behalf of KDE? I can’t use KDE Plasma on X11 with my Nvidia card. I am constantly experiencing fps drops. I was able to use it with Xrender in previous versions. But it is no longer there. So the only hope is Wayland. But they did not solve the problems even after months. There are KDE Plasma specific issues and they still haven’t fixed it. There is no news. I really need this. When will they fix this?

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  8. The desktop context menu
    Can we move change wallpaper and configure display
    To the bottom like windows did
    And make new at the top
    For better arrangements

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  9. Task Manager Task context menus can now contain recent things like “Recent Downloads” and “Recent connections”

    Thanks Broulik! This is really very wellcomed feature. I constantly wanted that Recent Downloads thing, like for example when I download stuff to different places (images to Pictures folder, audio to Music) and I need to open it from some app. Another example, I downloaded some svg for my new project, then want to edit it with Karbon, and I need remember and manually follow that specific path I used when saving a file I look for. Thanks to Recent Downloads, it will be more convenient now.

    Liked by 1 person

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  10. Hi Nate!

    >GTK applications using the Breeze-GTK theme now fully match the new appearance used in KDE apps (Jan Blackquill and Artem Grinev, Plasma 5.25):

    The colon ending the above sentence implies that you probably wanted to add a relevant screenshot or video, but the post lacks any of that.

    I tried to simply clone and build Breeze GTK master and it seems to be working quite well on 5.24.3, why not backporting it? Looks better than before indeed.

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    1. Backporting is a possibility, but it’s always least risky to leave it where it is so there can be more testing.

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  11. Geat work KDE as always !
    My two issues currently are :
    – when a video is playing in Firefox’s Picture in Picture mode, resizing it doesn’t keep ratio (so black border appears) ; this doesn’t happen in windows. I sthis a Firefox or a Kwin issue to report ?
    – regularly, with Neon and Fedora, rebooting in order to install updates doesn’t trigger the updates. Rebooting a second time triggers the update. This is quite annoying… do you know the reason ?

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  13. Nice addition with the Krunner settings screen. Perhaps you could add the setting to bind the Krunner placement to the primary monitor, since on Wayland session to always appears on the left most monitor regardless of where focus currently is?

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  14. The single biggest annoyance I experience (regularly) with KDE is having to re-configure the source of my personal desktop backgrounds. This seems to break every few months with updates / tiny UI tweaks that are done.

    On one levels, it’s good that it’s nothing too critical, but on another level it’s kind of frustrating to see it recur so often because it’s the sort of thing that only dawns on you slowly, “hey, why have none of my background come up for ages?!”

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  15. Great job, as always.

    It’s funny how I keep waiting for Saturday to read your post Nate. It’s really great to have this report every week.

    I honestly can’t thank you enough!!! LOL.

    About the Log Out and Lock Screen!!! I’m glad they’re gone too. I always use the shortcuts, anyway.

    I would like to leave a suggestion/ask a question:
    Doesn’t it make sense to have a shortcut to launch KRunner from System Monitor?

    Liked by 1 person

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    2. A use case:

      I had to kill some program (libreoffice, Firefox, even plasmashell) and the fastest way to restart it may be thru KRunner (in plasmashell case it’s one of the few ways).

      Yes, I have Alt+F2 or Alt+Space (that I use), but new users may search for a mouse click like they have on “Windoze” (file>run)

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    3. I think Kickoff is an equally fast method of re-launching it, no?

      Maybe we could add an option to restart the process that you’ve just killed when you use System Monitor’s “End Process” feature.

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    6. Yeah… Why would it be down?! Lol.

      It happened just a couple of times…
      but did happened…

      About your question of how did I get to system monitor: Ctrl+Esc …

      But I think I’m following you: if I entered Ctrl+Esc why can’t I do Alt+F2?

      the reason was just discoverability of KRunner.

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    7. I think if you know about Ctrl+Esc, we can expect that you’re a keyboard-shortcut-using expert who also knows about Alt+Space. 🙂

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  16. About alert, when installing proprietary software, I wish to add alert about possible mining cryptocurrencies and perform attacks to another systems.

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  17. When I have an issue with adaptive sync behavior, should I file a bug for kwin or kscreen?
    (Screen starts brightness flickering, once I pause a fullscreen video that has been playing in any browser, probably due to quirky LFC handling. It temporarily resolves while moving the mouse or when unpausing playback)

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  18. The proprietary software warning is fine for appeasing “GNU Slash Linux” zealots, but promotes a false sense of security. The “risks of installing proprietary software” are no more or less than that of the risks of installing FOSS, when nobody bothers looking at the code, or installs it via binary.
    The real danger here is the license agreement, and there are some open-source licences that are just ridiculous.

    I can’t find it anymore, but some 10 years ago I came across a blog which the author discovered a piece of software he was going to use was secretly sending passwords across to a gmail account. The author discovered the password to that gmail account in the source code, and went into their gmail and deleted dozens of emails containing credentials. That software was apparently like this for several years an went unchecked, until this user decided to look at the source. So there’s an example of malicious FOSS.

    Now, what about huge pieces of software like Linux, Firefox, LibreOffice, etc? Has anyone who installed these programs seen, or bothered to look at the source? It makes you wonder if there’s something cleverly hidden in Firefox, doesn’t it.

    My suggestion: have some kind of indicator of the type of EULA/license the software is released under, so people can decide if it’s acceptable. Actually that reminds me of a piece of software that was available for Windows called “EULAlyzer” which supposedly scans for suspicious terms in a EULA.

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    1. We do indicate the license that the software uses. However currently all of the proprietary software in Discover just shows up as “Proprietary”; it doesn’t distinguish between different types of proprietary licenses, or let you read the text. That would be worth looking into, if it’s technically feasible to have a generic mechanism for getting the license text form the app into the PackageKit, AppStream, Flatpak, or Snap libraries that Discover uses.

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  19. An off-topic question Nate:
    I think I’ve read somewhere you use Fedora…

    Is Discover able to do System Upgrades in Fedora like Gnome software does?

    Or we’re just stick to CLI?

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    1. Unfortunately not. It’s the last remaining blocker for me to recommend Fedora to people allergic to the command line. Once that’s fixed, I will unhesitatingly recommend it for all users and use cases.

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    2. 😦 I was planning on giving Fedora a try at home… But if I’m leaving openSUSE
      (would be great to have this at openSUSE as well), then it has to be for something better… And upgrade via GUI is a requisite!!!

      Is there a bug report about this that we can follow?

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