This week we made great progress on a lot of UI issues and bugs, and I bet you’ll find at least one issue that was annoying you fixed among these!
15-Minute Bugs Resolved
Current number of bugs: 51, down from 52. 1 added and 2 resolved:
Discover no longer sometimes fails to fetch reviews for apps, especially right after being launched (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.6)
The Overview effect’s keyboard shortcut should no longer sometimes randomly get broken (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26)
New Features
Non-EXIF textual metadata stored inside PNG images is now extracted and displayed in the Properties dialog (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.97):
User Interface Improvements
Discover no longer misleadingly shows you error notifications about offline updates that succeeded but for some off reason resulted in the underlying PackageKit backend producing a weird “[thing] is already installed” message (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.6)
The “Add Rule” sheet on System Settings’ Firewall page is now fully readable and looks better (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.25.4)
The highlight effect for hovered windows in the new Present Windows and Desktop Grid effects is now larger, making it easier to see (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26):
Discover now shows you a “Loading…” placeholder while it’s still loading the reviews for an app (Aleix Pol Gonzalez and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26):
On the Panel Edit Mode toolbar, those little draggable handles now display tooltips when hovered so that you can figure out what they do, and you can also double-click on them to reset them to their original states (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26):
In the screen chooser dialog for sandboxed apps that want to record the screen (such as OBS when run from Snap or Flatpak), the list items in the view now behave more rationally if you double-click on them (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26)
When a sandboxed app is recording the screen and the System Tray shows an icon to forcibly stop the recording, clicking on it now displays a context menu with “Stop Recording” in it rather than just stopping the recording immediately before you’ve had a chance to figure out what it does (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.26)
In the Comic Strip widget, the context menu item that previously said “Run associated application” now says “Open in [default web browser]” (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.26)
Visual transitions in the Pager widget (e.g. when you move, maximize, or tile a window) are now animated (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26):
In the properties dialog, when a file has GPS coordinates in the metadata, this information is now displayed as a clickable link (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.97):
The “Help Center” app’s icon is now always colorful when using the Breeze icon theme, just like other app icons are (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.97)
Bugfixes & Performance Improvements
Context menu items of the Comic Strip widget that don’t work when then you’re offline or before the current strip has loaded now disable themselves rather than letting you click on them and then making Plasma crash (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.24.7)
In the Plasma X11 session, the Color Picker widget is once again able to pick screen colors (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.24.7)
Submitting usefulness for reviews in Discover once again works (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.24.7)
In the Plasma Wayland session, fixed a way that KWin could crash when you press physical buttons on a connected drawing tablet (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25.4)
You can once again navigate between windows and desktops using the keyboard in the Desktop Grid effect (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.4)
In the Plasma X11 session, the “Window shade” feature once again works (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.4)
In the Plasma Wayland session, the cursor launch feedback animation played when launching an XWayland app now stops playing once the app has launched (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.25.4)
Fixed the final way that menu titles could get cut off when a long menu title is paired with short menu items (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.25.4)
On System Settings’ Colors page, the color scheme previews are now 100% accurate and actually reflect their colors (Jan Blackquill, Plasma 5.25.4)
In the Plasma Wayland session, sub-menus in the Kicker Application Menu can now be fully navigated with the keyboard (Someone awesome, Plasma 5.26)
Plasma is now faster to load (Xuetian Weng, Plasma 5.26)
When saving files in a sandboxed app in a folder that has a lot of stuff in it already, you will no longer sometimes randomly see pointless notifications that say “Examining: failed” (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.26)
In-window menubars in QtQuick apps now display the correct background color when using a color scheme with Header colors, such as Breeze Light and Breeze Dark (Kartikey Subramanium, Frameworks 5.97)
Spectacle and other apps now correctly detect the installation status for OBS Studio, Vokoscreen, and other 3rd-party apps in their “install other apps” menu (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.97)
…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.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
I really, really like this new background picture which KDE has since a month. Love it, it is the best KDE ever had (without saying the others were bad). I would like to see more of this style, if you have to change it, in a new version.
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You can thank Louis Durrant, the artist if the wallpaper
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I don’t like it at all. The previous 5.x backgrounds were geometrically pleasing and subtle. The new one’s distracting (and an eyesore, imo.)
The new “Landing” background was the first time in over six years that I’ve felt the need to change the default wallpaper in KDE.
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Imho Plasma haven’t ever had a good stock wallpaper. The only exception was the one with iceberg or something on it.
That geometry inclination all stock wallpapers have is just too simple and cartoon-ish. Nature sights are the best I think.
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I agree.
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It’ll be complete with a dark version of wallpaper which is activated in dark colorscheme. Like gnome. Softlanding wallpaper looks really nice.
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> Tons of UI improvements and bugfixes”
Tons of thanks! 🙂
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Is there a bug that tracks problems with the clipboard with Thunderbird and Firefox and KDE? I can not copy things from these apps to the KDE clipboard and this is very annoying. I assume I am not alone, where would I look or is there an existing bug.
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That works OK for me using the latest Kubuntu under X11, although you can look for a bug report.
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I am on KDE Neon at the moment which has not made the switch to latest Ubuntu LTS yet.
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To my knowledge, all such bugs are marked as fixed in either Plasma 5.25 or the upcoming 5.26. So you should open a new one if you’re using one of those releases and you’re still experiencing the bug.
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“In the Plasma X11 session, the Color Picker widget is once again able to pick screen colors (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.24.7)”
This was not fixed for me. I’m using Nvidia drivers and latest Plasma. This never happened on an Intel iGPU.
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The fix hasn’t made it into any releases yet. Patience. 🙂
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Thanks Nate! I’ll be patient then 😅
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“Ark has now been ported to use KHamburgerMenu for a cleaner default user interface”
I used Linux again today for the first time in half an eternity. Meanwhile my preferred desktop is KDE Plasma. The main reason is that I think hamburger menus are extremely bad design. And now I find out that these hamburger menus also exist in KDE Plasma?! Fortunately, in Manjaro it was only the default setting and you could switch to classic menus. I can live with that, even if the classic menus should be the default.
Please don’t make the mistake and go for horrible hamburger menus. The design may look cleaner. But it is infinitely worse in operation.
Article: Hamburger Menus and Hidden Navigation Hurt UX Metrics
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/
Discussion: Gnome’s Design is Anti-Pattern
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There’s a common misunderstanding about that Nielsen article. It’s about *navigation*, not access to commands. Hidden navigation is indeed less discoverable than visible navigation, but a single menu of commands in it isn’t really any worse in the discoverability department that a number of menus with commands in them. It could even have the potential to be better since everything is in one place.
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