This week in KDE: Getting Plasma 5.26 ready

This Week in KDE 3 Minutes

This week we’re getting ready for the Plasma 5.26 beta and focused on bugfixing and UI polish. Expect more of this over the next few weeks!

New Features

While in Touch mode in the Plasma Wayland session, you can now force the Maliit Virtual Keyboard to appear even if it didn’t appear automatically (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26. Link)

In System Monitor and the Plasma widgets of the same name, you can now query sensors for your CPUs’ minimum, maximum, and average temperature and frequency (Alessio Bonfiglio, Plasma 5.26. Link)

User Interface Improvements

Gwenview can now open GIMP’s .xcf files (Nicolas Fella, Gwenview 22.08.1. Link)

Elisa now shows you a user-friendly message explaining what didn’t work when you drag-and-drop non-audio files onto it (Bharadwaj Raju, Elisa 22.12. Link)

In Kickoff, Flatpak apps now show the “Uninstall or Manage Add-ons” menu item in their context menus (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

Info Center pages now have a visually obvious “Copy to Clipboard” button you can use to copy their entire text to the clipboard (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Night Color now has a simpler interface for turning it on and off: now the “off” status is a part of the combobox to choose the activation time, rather than being a second checkbox (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.26. Link):

The User Switcher widget no longer has a confusing “Leave” button that shuts down the computer; this has been replaced with a “Log out” button that, well, logs you out! (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Significant Bugfixes

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

Connecting to Windows Samba shares now works when using samba-libs 4.16 or higher, because they changed a behavior out from under everyone and we had to work around it! (Harald Sitter, kio-extras 22.08.2. Link)

Fixed another common source of KWin crashes in the Plasma Wayland session when plugging or unplugging screens (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.25.5. Link)

KWin no longer crashes when waking up from sleep with the “KDE Snap Assist” script active (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)

KRunner’s code is no longer overridable by 3rd-party Plasma themes, making them no longer capable of breaking it such that it can’t be opened, which, yes, was totally a thing that sometimes happened (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.26. Link)

The KWin crossfade effect is back, meaning that you will once again see a nice cross-fade when maximizing and de-maximizing windows, and when moving between panel tooltips (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Apps and windows on the Task Manager are now much more resistant to being accidentally dragged when you mean to just click on them (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, panel tooltips once again morph using the KWin Morphing Popups effect (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.99. 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

Published

23 thoughts on “This week in KDE: Getting Plasma 5.26 ready”

  1. Again there are improvements for the virtual keyboard for touchscreens, but it still doesn’t work at all for desktops and hybrids after so long 😦

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    2. My bad, in english they are usually called 2-in-1 laptops. But the point is that if you have or supposedly have a physical keyboard attached, you can’t use the on-screen keyboard. That’s pretty bad for accessibility.

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    3. With a 2-in-1 laptop, when you fold the screen back, the keyboard and touchpad are supposed to be automatically disabled. This works for mine (ThinkPad X1 Yoga). If it doesn’t work for yours, it’s a bug either in Libinput or in the kernel.

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    4. Actually my case is the other one I mention, I have an old laptop with a slightly damaged keyboard, and for various reasons it is often problematic to use an external one.
      So unlike any other desktop (cinnamon does it especially well) with kde I can’t use an onscreen keyboard, there are no third party alternatives in wayland either.

      Even if I’m not someone with a peculiar device or disability, I guess there’s no reason why I’m not allowed to use it, don’t you think?

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    5. Sure, I don’t deny that it would be a nice optional feature for people with damaged physical keyboards. Feel free to file a feature request that explains this valid use case.

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  2. Many excellent improvements, I find it really impressive that this much work has been done in the span of a week. The CPU temperature info for system monitor is so useful IMO. I was just wondering about the changes to Maliit keyboard behavior, does that mean it can be used for GTK applications as well since it didn’t appear automatically for them?
    Thanks for all the good work to you and the community

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  4. I love KDE. It’s the DE of my choice. But, I’m struggling to get non tech people on board. Simple things are missing, like right click on a partition to rename a drive, to format a drive etc..
    But, things are heading in the right direction. Go KDE devs😃

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    2. Yes. Usability issues. For example, inserting a usb and format it extFat, fat32 etc.. to be recognised in a TV, with a video file. You need to use gparted, kparted etc… A non-teqkie spent s lot of time trying to find the option in Dolphin.
      Renaming partitions when you have more of them is another one.
      Trying to program an Arduino from Linux with a dodgy connector.. to the missing USB sounds makes it more difficult. These are just some use cases my friends encountered after the switch..

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    3. I can see what you mean, but, again, those aren’t things that non-technical users will typically do–especially programming an Arduino! I agree that we can make these workflows better for technical users though.

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    7. Yes and yes. From my point of view, and any non-technical person, you should be able to format a USB device from right clicking on it. It makes sense

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  6. I type command to forceactivate maliit-keyboard. maliit doesn’t popup.

    Here is my command
    “qdbus org.kde.KWin /VirtualKeyboard org.kde.kwin.VirtualKeyboard.forceActivate”

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    1. system: kde-neon
      kwin: 5.26.5-0xneon+22.04+jammy+release+build25
      maliit-keyboard: 2.2.0-0xneon+22.04+jammy+release+build2

      System run in virtualbox

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