This week in KDE: big things

This Week in KDE 4 Minutes

Several big things happened this week, so let’s just jump in:

Ilya Pominov has added a feature to Gwenview 22.08 that lets you mark up and annotate images using the same annotation UI that’s in Spectacle!

For Plasma 5.26, Han Young has merged System Settings’ “Formats” and “Languages” pages together, which clarifies the relationship between the systemwide language and its default formats and fixes most of the bugs affecting both of the two old pages!

For Frameworks 5.97, Slava Aseev has implemented support in KWallet for the org.freedesktop.secrets standard, which allows KDE apps to be more compatible with 3rd-party credential storage methods. In terms of real-world impacts, the Minecraft launcher should no longer ask you to log in every single time you open it!

Finally on our list of big changes, for Plasma 5.26 Harald Sitter has added support in KDE’s crash reporter for sending crash information to a self-hosted instance of Sentry a server-side crash tracing service that will eventually be capable of injecting debug symbols automatically. It may sound technical and boring, but over time it should lead to crash reports becoming more actionable, wasting less of everyone’s time.

Beyond those, we have a pretty good assortment of other changes to present as well!

15-Minute Bugs Resolved

Current number of bugs: 53, down from 57. 0 added, 2 found to already be fixed by something else, and 2 fixed as a part of the merged Region & Language page! Thanks, awesome people.

Current list of bugs

Other User Interface Improvements

When you cancel loading a slow folder in Dolphin, the placeholder message in the middle of the window now says “Loading canceled” rather than “Folder is empty” (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.08)

Clicking on a Konsole notification about a particular session now takes you to that session in Konsole (Kasper Laudrup, Martin Tobias Holmedahl Sandsmark, and Luis Javier Merino, Konsole 22.08)

Dragging a file to a notification now activates and raises the relevant window from the sending application so you can drag the file into it (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.26)

System Settings’ Display & Monitor page now displays the explanatory help text for the two Wayland-specific systemwide scaling methods in a tooltip, rather than inline (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26):

The common “Get new [thing]” dialog no longer has a redundant close button in its footer and now tells you to try again later for transient network and server errors (Felipe Kinoshita and me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.97)

Text changes made in the “Name” field of file open/save dialogs is now undoable and redoable (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.97)

Message dialogs with “Yes” and “No” buttons are changing their text to be more descriptive in multiple pieces of KDE software (Friedrich W. H. Kossebau, the next versions of a bunch of things)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Fixed one way that a file in Okular could be corrupted and rendered un-save-able when saved (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 22.04.3)

Sidebar entries in Elisa no longer become mis-sorted after changing what’s embedded in the sidebar (Yerrey Dev, Elisa 22.08)

The new “accent color from wallpaper” feature now updates the titlebar’s color as expected when the wallpaper changes automatically (for example when using a slideshow for the wallpaper) and also correctly applies manually-chosen accent colors to window titlebars when using a color scheme that doesn’t use header colors, such as Breeze Classic (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.25.3)

The Slide effect no longer flickers disturbingly when using a multi-screen setup (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.25.3)

The Cover Flip and Flip Switch effect are now smoother with fewer frame drops when using the default “Show selected window” option in the System Settings Task Switcher page (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.25.3)

In the Plasma Wayland session, using a global keyboard shortcut to launch an application with startup animation turned off now inhibits the startup animation as expected (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25.3)

Right-clicking on an item in the Kickoff application launcher’s right panel no longer causes its highlight effect to disappear while the context menu is open (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25.3)

In Discover, the tooltips shown when hovering the cursor over the big new buttons on the Application page no longer sometimes disappear immediately after appearing (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25.3)

Removing the leftmost screen of a multi-screen arrangement no longer sometimes causes windows on the remaining screens to no longer be movable (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26)

Using a global keyboard shortcut to launch an application with the “Launch in terminal” option enabled now actually launches it in a terminal window as expected (Jin Liu, Frameworks 5.96)

…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

15 thoughts on “This week in KDE: big things”

  1. The konsole notification thingie should mainly be credited to Kasper Laudrup, who wrote the original patch back in 2012, and also to Martin Sandsmark, who updated it in 2016.

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  2. To be honest, monumental changes happened this week. org.freedesktop.secrets standard implementation, will not bother so many new users when they install loads of application. Kudos to everyone involved. Besides, the Language and Formats closed 23 bugs alone. Hot damn!

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  3. KDE Plasma 5.25.2 kicks ass. A big thank you to all of the KDE developers around the world. And a special thanks to Fushan Wen for finding and fixing that upstream QT bug that lead to so many issues with multi-monitor setups. I’ve seen a huge improvement since 5.25.2 hit Tumbleweed, and I’m now seeing the same in Fedora 36. Plasma is waaaaaay more robust at dealing with my triple monitor + DP KVM setup compared to 5.24.5. The worst I’ve seen now is that occasionally the right display (connected to the 1st GPU output) starts out black after a resume / KVM input change back (you can still interact with it e.g. right click), but it sorts itself out in probably 15 seconds.

    And the accent color / tint from wallpaper is great. Is there a way to force it on flatpaks as well?

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    1. That’s great news! Thanks for the kind words.

      The accent color from wallpaper already does apply to Flatpak apps. If you see bugs, please report them!

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  5. >> For Frameworks 5.97, Slava Aseev has implemented support in KWallet for the org.freedesktop.secrets
    >> standard

    Happy

    I was waiting for many years that kwallet can be accessed with “secret” standard.
    Skype uses “secret” to store id and pwd. and today it uses gnome keyring. Gnome keyring does not works in kde environment. For each login it asks for the password of the keyring.

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  6. So glad to finally see KWallet secrets support officially merged. VS Code uses that to store account information for its native Settings Sync. Now I won’t have to use the AUR package anymore 😀

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  7. > sending crash information to Sentry, a server-side crash tracing service

    Is this service hosted and under fully control of KDE or does it use a third party service (https://sentry.io/), which comes with their own privacy policy and do you rent their service?

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  8. Those are indeed big things. Merging the language and format and the updates to the crash reporter are gonna be great.
    A big thanks to you and everyone involved as well!

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  9. Wow, lots of great stuff here! Been waiting for the secrets for awhile; seeing the markup come to Gwenview is very welcome; and the cleanup in System Settings has been a long time coming, well done 👏

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