This week in KDE: We don’t like bugs very much

This Week in KDE 5 Minutes

With the Plasma 5.25 beta released, this was a very bug-squishy week. We managed to land a new feature and some UI improvements, but the focus was on fixing bugs, as you can see below!

Go install the beta release and file bug reports! Find all the issues we missed so we can fix more bugs!

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 63, down from 68. 0 added and 5 resolved:

The screen locker no longer shows its interactive UI elements under certain circumstances (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25)

The screen locker can now be unlocked if your user account doesn’t have a password set (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25)

With an auto-hide Panel, right-clicking on a Widget and clicking “Show Alternatives…” now works (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.25)

All System Settings and Info Center modules are once again right-clickable in Kickoff (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.25)

The 3rd-party “WeatherWidget2” widget once again works when you also have any 1st-party System Monitor widgets in use (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.95)

Current list of bugs

New Features

You can now set an alternate calendar that will be displayed inside the main calendar, so you can keep track of dates in both calendars at once! (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin is now more reliably able to download and install new context menu services (Alexander Lohnau, Dolphin 22.04.2)

Elisa’s playlist sidebar is once again keyboard-navigable, and now it works even better than ever before and you can fully reach and trigger all controls for each item in it (Tranter Madi, Elisa 22.08)

System Settings’ Plasma Styles page once again shows your installed Plasma styles (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.6, and I have asked distros to backport it to Plasma 5.24.5 as well)

The “Shut Down” and “Restart” Buttons are once again visible in the fullscreen Application Dashboard launcher (Amy Rose, Plasma 5.24.6)

In the Plasma Wayland session, System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page now correctly remembers what you configured for its “Target Display” setting (David Redondo Plasma 5.42.6)

When shutting down the system, the kded background process now quits properly rather than being abruptly terminated, allowing it to correctly perform cleanup operations which should fix a variety of subtle bugs all over the place (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the cursor no longer flickers when dragging something while using the default Breeze cursor theme (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when you have rotated any of your monitors, connecting a new one no longer un-rotates the rotated ones (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25)

CSD-using dialog windows in GTK apps using the Breeze GTK theme now have close buttons that match the styling of other windows (Artem Grinev, Plasma 5.25)

Fixed various slightly incorrect colors in GTK apps using the Breeze GTK theme (Artem Grinev, Plasma 5.25)

When you open the Desktop configuration window, the “Wallpaper” item in the sidebar is now correctly highlighted when the rest of the window is showing the Wallpaper page (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, a wide variety of single-window KDE apps now have their existing windows brought to the front when re-launched from Kickoff, KRunner, etc (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.25, KDE apps version 22.08, and various other KDE apps too, I’m sure)

In the Plasma Wayland session, drag-and-drop onto XWayland-using apps now works better (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when you drag something, the cursor now generally always changes to the correct “you can drop it here” cursor when moving over an area that can accept the dragged thing (David Redondo, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when you hit Meta+V to show the clipboard history menu, an entry for it no longer appears in the Task Manager or Task Switcher (David Redondo, Plasma 5.25)

The Task Manager no longer takes up slightly too much space when not showing anything (Victor Pavan, Plasma 5.25)

When using System Settings’ icon view, hovering over an icon on the homepage no longer shows two tooltips (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.25)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when you launch a single-instance app that’s already running using either a global shortcut or the Overview Effect’s KRunner-powered search field, its window is now raised as you would expect (Aleix Pol Gonzales, Plasma 5.25 with Frameworks 5.95)

Column views in Kirigami no longer leak memory when you navigate back and forth in them (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.95)

User Interface Improvements

When you hover over the free space bar at the bottom of a Dolphin window, its tooltip now tells you the disk capacity too (Shubham, Dolphin 22.08):

When using your system in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, the alphabetical ordering of apps in Kickoff now groups apps by the romanization of their names, not their first characters–which it may surprise you to learn is something considered generally desirable by speakers of those languages (Xuetian Weng, Plasma 5.25):

CSD-using GTK apps using the Breeze GTK theme now better match the styling of other apps: their corner radius is now equal, there’s a subtle light highlight on top, and menu shadows look like the shadows for Qt/KDE menu shadows (Artem Grinev, Plasma 5.25):

“Level bars” in apps using the Breeze GTK theme now have a nice Breezey appearance (Artem Grinev, Plasma 5.25)

System Settings’ Search page now has a simpler UI to include or exclude a folder from indexing: each action just has a button on the bottom of the page to let you do it (Áron Kovács, Plasma 5.25):

System Settings’ Touch Screen Edges page is now only visible in the Plasma Wayland session, since the feature only really works properly on Wayland (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25)

On the login and lock screens, the little battery indicator icon in the corner now has a more aesthetically pleasing size and scale (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.25)

The User Switcher widget now displays a prettier round representation of your user picture (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.25):

Text for app descriptions in Discover and image metadata in the Picture of the Day wallpaper settings page is now selectable and copyable (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26)

Scrolling over the calendar view in various Plasma widgets now does what you would expect (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.95)

Collapsed Kirigami sidebars’ “Open Sidebar” buttons now have a tooltip so you can tell what it is (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.95)

…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

25 thoughts on “This week in KDE: We don’t like bugs very much”

  1. Hey Nate, i’m pretty sure something is broken between Qt and KDE patches over. KDE collection patches over Qt 5.15.2 and Plasma 5.23 Wayland session was restored correctly, so Qt 5.15.3+ and Plasma 5.24+ (including 5.25 beta) Wayland does not restore session.

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    1. I’d recommend contacting your distro about this. Sounds like it could be a packaging issue.

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  2. Excellent work👍

    Is Matrix the right place if I want to discuss some piece of code that I find suspicious or wrong? If so, how do I do it right? Create a chatroom and invite some developers or write in a general one?

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    1. Because that’s the way they were implemented. 🙂 I gather you don’t like it; a bug report explaining the issue would be appreciated.

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  5. When KDE Neon changes it’s base to 22.04, will those who do not upgrade still receive KDE/Plasma updates, or will it just stop with the last versions before moving on?

    Just wondering if I will have to migrate later this year or be able to hang back with 20.04 for awhile yet. First time running Neon in any serious or semi-permanent production capacity and have not encountered this situation yet. Thanks!

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    1. Not 100% sure about this but I always thought that KDE Neon just rolls on when it’s ready. Meaning that there won’t be any version that stays behind on an older Ubuntu base, so one just has to tag along for the ride.

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  6. Wish list:

    1) An option to make Discover only check for and/or fetch updates when told to, rather than whenever the program is opened. I am very tired of every time I open Discover, it spends 5-10 minutes “fetching updates” (even if there are none), and if there are any, I can’t say “update later, dang it” but rather have to wait, and wait, and wait for it to finish. Which sometimes it fails to do. (I think this behavior is also causing it to loop — lately was trying to update-and-upgrade a Fedora/KDE setup and after the third unproductive effort where it nonetheless took an hour downloading those updates — and it monopolizes my already-crap connection so I can’t even use it with another PC! — finally resorted to doing the whole process in the terminal.)

    It has the same bad behavior on my Pinephone/Manjaro, so it ain’t just Fedora.

    2) Control over scrollbar width. (No, the mousewheel is not a good substitute for being able to reasonably grab it.)

    I have little to complain of otherwise, and rarely encounter bugs (KDE mostly does a great job).

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    1. Discover suffers from being stuck displaying “fetching updates” since ages. I don’t get as to why this functionality has not been put as an option yet as it impairs basic interaction with the application every single time it is being opened. IMHO it is a matter of accepting the fact to not being able to solve this bug for whatever reason and just disable automatic update, at least.

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    2. We fixed an issue that sounds like this that people filed bug reports about. If you’re experiencing a similar issue or the same, please file a bug report so we can investigate.

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    1. Install “Dark Reader” extension in your browser, and have dark theme everywhere (configurable by site, if you wish). It does a very good job on most sites, even in default mode.

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    2. ^ YES! Dark Reader is awesome. Instant dark mode for any site. Been using it in Firefox and Firefox for Android for years.

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    1. This sort of message does not help. What exactly is not working? Is the problem reproduceable? What is your setup? which distro? which frameworks version? which plasma version?

      Screaming “fix it!” really does not help and it’s probably very demotivating for plasma developers.

      Anyway, try the latest Beta if you want, it’s been working perfectly for me on my three monitors setup, plugging/unplugging without issues 🙂

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    2. I have had plasmashell crash when I connect an external monitor. I have also had my desktop layout reset when disconnecting or plugging in a monitor. I also had my sometimes be reset when unplugging a monitor. From what I have heard, many of the issues happen when you have the monitor on the left. I am on the Plasma 5.25 beta and also tested on Plasma 5.24.5 on Arch Linux with framework version 5.94.

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    6. Oh I’m so happy to hear that. We did a lot of work for multimonitor reliability in 5.25 so I’m really happy to hear that it’s working well for you.

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    1. kwayland-server’s code was merged into KWin for 5.25. The kwayland-server repo can be ignored.

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