This week in KDE: day color

This Week in KDE 3 Minutes

We’re getting close to the Plasma 5.26 beta and plenty of features have landed before the soft feature freeze–the point at which new features need discussion before being merge-able. Many are mentioned below! But now, the idea is to focus on bugfixing and UI polish for the next six weeks before the final release of Plasma 5.26, and assistance is greatly appreciated. If you’re a developer who’s excited about Plasma, the time to fix bugs is now! Which bugs? These bugs! Pick a bug and fix it!

New Features

On System Settings’ Night Color page, you can now set a day color in addition to a night color for maximum flexibility (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.26. Link):

Discover now displays content ratings for apps that support them! (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26. Link):

Discover now lets you change the name used for submitting a review (Bernardo Gomes Negri, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Discover now has a “Share” button on each app’s details page that lets you send a link to the app to someone else (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Discover now checks to make sure there’s enough free space before updating, and warns you when there isn’t (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26. Link)

You can now configure what happens when you activate a window that’s currently living on another Virtual Desktop: you get switched to that window’s Virtual Desktop (the default setting) or the window jumps to your current Virtual Desktop (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.26. Link):

User Interface Improvements

When using a multi-monitor setup, window position is now remembered on a per-screen basis, so when screens are plugged in and unplugged, windows that have not been manually moved will be automatically moved to the last screen they were known to be on (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Bluetooth device pairing/permission/etc notifications will now appear even when you’re in Do Not Disturb mode, so you don’t miss them (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.26. Link)

The Color Picker widget’s popup now features a placeholder message when there are no colors in it, and it lets you remove saved colors (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26. Link 1 and Link 2)

The compact representation of a standalone Media Controller widget (not the one that appears in the System Tray by default) now shows you the title, artist, and album art of the currently-playing track (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26. Link):

You can now also zoom in using the Meta+Plus keyboard shortcut, which should be easier for people with ISO keyboards than the old default of just Meta+Equals (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Significant Bugfixes

(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)

When your battery reaches the “critically low” threshold, the screen will no longer be inappropriately brightened if it was already under the brightness level that it would be automatically set to (Louis Moureaux, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

Applying a cursor theme that inherits itself no longer renders you unable to log into your user account (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.5. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, KWin no longer sometimes crashes when dragging an attachment from Thunderbird (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.5. Link)

In Discover, clicking the button to delete the user data for for a no-longer-installed app that came from a local Flatpak bundle (not a more common .flatpakref file or an app from a remote repo) no longer deletes all user data for all Flatpak apps (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

…And everything else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! 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

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21 thoughts on “This week in KDE: day color”

    5. Aha…. my secondary is Fedora KDE. And this seems to be a KDE issue as very rarely the PCLOS/KDE system will do this too (tho it’s generally more stable and takes weeks to lose its marbles, rather than days), and I’ve also seen it once on Mageia (tho don’t normally use this one).

      Normal pattern is always on but asleep when not in use. However, after several days the desktop becomes unresponsive (and desaturates itself to so inform me) and then I cannot shut down or restart via the menu (it goes through the motions, but nothing happens). Also (this is Fedora only), Chrome’s bookmarks become visually disconnected from the bookmarks bar (and don’t work), as if it doesn’t know where to paint them. If I can still get to Konsole, “reboot” works, but shuts down rather than rebooting.

      I dislike restarting the Fedora box as it takes a good five minutes to reach a usable state (vs 30 seconds for PCLOS, on equivalent hardware), so I resist doing this as a routine fix.

      I don’t know what logs might be useful, or where to find them.

      PS. Reading about all the little polishing fixes makes me happy. 🙂

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    6. This may be a feature request but one simple item system settings is missing that even Gnome has, is the ability to change the name of your computer. Is that something easy to be added to system settings? I am thinking it should simply be on the about page

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  3. Great work!
    I’m a night color user and I don’t want any filter during daylight hours. Presumably 6500K is ‘no filter’ however this may not be obvious to everybody. Could really do with a ‘no daytime filter’ checkbox or something that makes clear “6500K=no filter.”

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    4. Natalie, as a silent reader of the Plasma Gitlab, I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you as a newish contributor to Kwin/Plasma for your work on Plasma. I especially noticed your thoughful and thorough comments in your PRs and your tenacity in tougher PRs like »Add new option for behavior when window on different desktop is activated«. Thank you for helping to make Plasma shine. 🙂

      Liked by 1 person

    5. …and your tenacity in tougher PRs like »Add new option for behavior when window on different desktop is activated«.

      Yeah sorry about that, that was kind of my bad for holding it up for so long. I was misunderstanding the use case that it benefited.

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    6. While your tendency to ask for amendments/clarifications/simplifications in PRs maybe »holds up« some PRs, I appreciate and thank you for your work there and in general.

      You have a keen eye towards tasteful and easy-to-use program design. Your requests in PRs of others for further work usually one-ups the quality of PRs towards the needs/knowledge of non-techy users. Together with your own simplifying PRs against e.g. once overbearing GUI layouts or unclear strings in apps, it gives me confidence that Plasma/KDE will honor »Simple by Default Powerful When Needed« from top to bottom in the near future.

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  4. I’d thought I’ll ask it here, but does anyone aware of any plan or work on getting Drag-Panel-to-Drag-Window and/or Scroll-on-Panel-to-Switch-Workspace to native plasma panel? That’s really the only latte-dock thing that I’d miss if I don’t use it (I can live without it, but it’s so handy).

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