This week in KDE: yo dawg, I heard you wanted stability

This Week in KDE 4 Minutes

People are always saying that they want us to slow down on the features and focus on stability for a while. Well, we’ve heard you and we’re doing just that for Plasma 5.26 in general, and specifically are focusing almost entirely on bug work during the one-month beta period. The results so far have been tremendous! I suspect everyone reading this post should find something in the “Significant Bugfixes” section to be happy about! Possibly multiple things. This is the time to file your beta bugs! They’ll get fixed quickly. Let’s all help to make Plasma 5.26 the most stable release ever!

New Features

Kdenlive has now adopted KHamburgerMenu, so if you turn off its normal menu bar (which remains visible by default), you can still access its full menu structure (Julius Künzel, Kdenlive 22.12. Link)

If your keyboard has a “Calculator” button, pressing it will now open KCalc (Paul Worrall, KCalc 22.12. Link)

User Interface Improvements

The global Edit Mode toolbar now has a nicer and smoother enter/exit animation (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

The Plasma Media Player and Notifications plasmoids are now grouped with system services rather than app status indicators, so your apps’ System Tray icons will always be together in a group, without these plasmoids appearing in random-seeming positions among them (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26. Link)

You can once again switch tabs in Kickoff the Ctrl+Tab shortcut, and now also the standard ones too (Ctrl+PageUp / Ctrl+PageDown and Ctrl+[ / Ctrl+]) (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26. Link)

The marks you make on the screen using the Mouse Mark effect now appear in screenshots and screen recordings (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)

On the lock screen, you can now zoom in and out, and clear the password field with the semi-common-ish Ctrl+Alt+U keyboard shortcut (Ezike Ebuka and Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.26 and Frameworks 5.99, Link 1 and link 2)

Tooltips throughout Plasma and QtQuick-based apps now smoothly fade in and out when they appear and disappear (Bharadwaj Raju, Frameworks 5.99. Link 1 and link 2)

Significant Bugfixes

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

In the Plasma Wayland session, Plasma no longer sometimes crashes when dragging items from Kickoff that aren’t on the Favorites page to somewhere else (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

On System Settings’ Fonts page, the sub-pixel anti-aliasing and hinting settings now reflect the true state of reality on first boot as configured by your distro, rather than inaccurately always saying that the system is using RGB sub-pixel anti-aliasing and slight hinting (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

Also fixed the most common Plasma crash, which could happen sometimes when searching using KRunner (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Fixed the second-most-common Plasma crash, which could happen sometimes when dragging widgets out of the widget explorer (Fushan Wen, the latest release of the KDE Qt patch collection. Link)

Desktop widgets and icons no longer randomly move around and reset their positions sometimes when you log in! (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26. Link 1 and link 2)

When using an NVIDIA GPU in the Plasma Wayland session, clicking on Kickoff’s panel button now always opens it as expected (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.26. Link)

On the subject of NVIDIA, we also fixed a major issue with NVIDIA GPUs that could cause various elements of Plasma to be visually corrupted after the system wakes from sleep (David Edmundson and Andrey Butirsky, Plasma 5.26. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Right after the system wakes up, the desktop is no longer displayed for a moment right before the lock screen appears (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.26. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, dragging files to Firefox now works properly again (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Un-maximizing a maximized window while using a floating panel no longer leaves a weird shadow floating in space (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)

The desktop context menu’s “Add Panel” sub-menu no longer shows non-functional items for “Empty Grouping Plasmoid” and “Empty System Tray” (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.26. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, those of you using the latest Frameworks plus Plasma 5.25.5 should now see your widgets and notifications positioned in the right place (Xaver Hugl, Frameworks 5.99 or else distro-patched 5.98. Link)

Floating panels and the corners of Plasma dialogs/popups no longer exhibit the customary dots and other visual glitches you’ve become accustomed to 🙂 (Niccolò Venerandi, Frameworks 5.99. Link)

Fixed yet another way that some Kirigami-based scrollviews using a recent version of the KDE Qt patch collection could display an unnecessary horizontal scrollbar (Marco Martin, Kirigami 5.99. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Something worth noting is that this week we made our Bugzilla bot start automatically promoting bugs to be 15-minute bugs or very high priority bugs to reduce the manual work for bug triagers. As a result, the total numbers kept going up this week as the bug bot did its work to re-classify old bugs. So the fact that we still managed to keep ahead of that and reduce the totals on net–and during a Plasma beta period too, when people are filing more bug reports than average–is very impressive to me!

…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, fix Plasma 5.26 beta bugs! Let’s make this bug list empty before the final release!

Beyond that, 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: yo dawg, I heard you wanted stability”

  1. I have been using KDE a lot and almost daily for over ten years. It is my preferred Linux environment because it offers so many functions. It lets me use my computer the way I want to use it.

    But most of all I love KDE for its stability. In all these years I have seen maybe five to ten bugs that really bothered me. But that’s not much in ten years.

    In my eyes, KDE is the Koolest Linux environment there is and pretty much the only one that could make a mass adoption of Linux – if it becomes a reality – possible.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. That’s great to hear!

      It’s easy to forget that most people have a good experience. A lot of us spend all day buried in bug reports and buggy code and come away with the impression that there’s a ongoing emergency, whereas a lot of these problems are either minor or only affects certain setups. The truth is probably somewhere in between. Thanks for the perspective!

      Like

    2. Agree with ManuelBoe. Stability and consistency are a Big Deal. I can hand KDE to a stranger and be assured that they’ll have a good experience.

      Like

    3. I agree! Despite a few bugs, KDE is the best desktop experience I’ve had. Nothing else I’ve found provides such a balance of customization, intuitiveness and new features. Somehow the devs keep outdoing themselves!

      I just tried the latest Neon ISO and it feels twice as polished as the last update. All the tweaks and bug-fixes have only made the best desktop better 🙂

      Liked by 1 person

  5. Thanks everyone for your hard work, Plasma is getting more and more polished with each report.

    Looking forward towards 5.26, it looks like it’s gonna be an amazing release!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  7. Well I hope stability is the case but that isn’t my experience with the 5.26 beta. It is the most unstable version of KDE I’ve ever used, with constant hanging and Kwin crashing.

    Like

    Reply

    1. That doesn’t sound good. Have you filed bug reports? If not, can you please do so? I’d hate for these issues to make it into the final release.

      Thanks!

      Like

  8. I’m so happy, this is the best approach to optimize Plasma desktop, first stabilizing the ground then adding new features, because adding features on something unstable will always generates more bugs.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  10. Hello and many thanks for your fantastic job!

    But I have a question: Will we be able to continue using Linux and KDE without interference in the future?
    In their great wisdom, web standard bodies decided that it would be a good idea to permit websites to certify the manufacturer and “health” of the device (i.e., if it has been jailbroken)…

    https://blog.cloudflare.com/private-attestation-token-device-posture/

    I want to know if you think this poses a real danger to desktop Linux’s future.
    Are we going to have to put up with the same type of nonsense that users of modified Android ROMs do, needing to go around Pluton and other things as they have to get around SafetyNet?

    Like

    Reply

    1. Interesting. It sounds like something for _corporate_ websites that need to know the device accessing it hasn’t been compromised. @mjg59 and others have worked on Linux attestation, enabling the UEFI BIOS, the bootloader, and the kernel to form a chain that validates that each software layer hasn’t been compromised. It sounds like a sufficiently motivated user or corporation could get this web-based service to work on a Linux computer. Yes, if this complicated system relied on Apple validating the kernel, then a Mac running Linux wouldn’t fly, but maybe a motivated distro like Fedora could do their own validation; It sounds like you’d have to convince the website asking for validation to trust Fedora’s attestation.

      Like

  12. > If your keyboard has a “Calculator” button, pressing it will now open KCalc

    I hope it doesn’t spawn a dozen of calculators with autorepeat… 😅

    Like

    Reply

    1. Since KCalc isn’t set up a a single-instance app, looks like it will.

      Good UX improvement opportunity. Wanna fix it?

      Like

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