These weeks in KDE: Akademy and Plasma 5.26

This Week in KDE 4 Minutes

Over the past two weeks, the KDE community has largely been preparing for and attending Akademy, the big annual in-person conference. It’s a great time to bond socially and discuss important topics face-to-face, and more on that later! Meanwhile we’ve also been getting Plasma 5.26 ready, which has benefited from a major focus on stability. Expect that to ramp up now that Akademy is finished. More on that later as well!

New Features

Ark now supports ARJ archives (Ilya Pominov, Ark 22.12. Link)

Kate and KWrite now have a welcome window when launched without any files open. (Eric Armbruster and Christoph Cullmann, Kate & KWrite 22.12. Link):

This is what KWrite shows, and Kate is currently being adapted to show a much more advanced version!

User Interface Improvements

In Dolphin, dragging-and-dropping a folder onto an empty area of the tab bar now opens it in a new tab (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 22.12. Link)

The animation for the Slide Desktops effect has been made a bit faster, due to popular demand (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)

In the “new screen plugged in” chooser OSD, choosing “Extend Left” now actually makes the new screen extend left, and it extends from the current primary screen (Allan Sandfield Jensen, Plasma 5.26. Link 1 and link 2)

On System Settings’ Colors page, clicking the “From current wallpaper” option now updates the preview view immediately to show the accent color that will be used (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 5.26. Link)

When transferring files using Bluetooth, the progress notification now shows more detailed and useful information (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Uninstalling an app now removes its icon from the Kickoff Application Launcher’s favorites list/grid immediately (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Picture of the Day wallpapers how have a nice cross-fade transition animation when switching from one picture to another, or to a different type of Picture of the Day picture (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link)

The Breeze Window Decoration theme setting to continue displaying window borders for maximized and tiled windows has now been re-worded for clarity (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27. Link)

The Media Frame widget’s “Show/hide background” setting now uses the standard user interface for this, with a button on its Edit Mode toolbar (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link)

When replying to a text message using the KDE Connect plasmoid, the text field is now inline rather than in a separate dialog window (Bharadwaj Raju, KDE Connect 22.12. Link)

When you unmount a removable device in Dolphin, its Eject button now transforms into a busy indicator so you know when it’s safe to physically unplug it (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.100. Link):

Significant Bugfixes

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

Switching between Global Themes that include their own desktop layouts no longer sometimes causes Plasma to crash and lose your panels (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

System Settings no longer sometimes crashes when navigating away from the Thunderbolt page (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

On System Settings’ Users page, It is once again possible to change your user password and nothing else when using a recent version of the AccountsService library (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.24.7. Link)

In the Plasma X11 session, when repeated graphical crashes cause KWin to disable compositing, it will now periodically check to see if it’s better, and if it is, it will re-renable compositing so you don’t have to do it manually or lose compositing forever if you don’t know that this has to be done (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Application Dashboard grid items now have two lines of text, so you can actually read longer labels (Tomáš Hnyk, Plasma 5.26. Link)

In the Plasma X11 session, when KWin crashes and auto-restarts–or is manually restarted–it no longer loses its mapping of windows to Activities (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Fixed an issue that could occasionally cause apps like VLC and Firefox to stop refreshing after being used for a while (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.26. Link)

In the Networks plasmoid, networks no longer jump around and re-arrange themselves while you’re trying to connect to one or enter your password (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.26. Link)

Discover and other apps that can display animated images can no longer freeze when displaying certain PCX images (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.99. Link)

Various System Monitor graphs no longer blink, stutter, and freeze when using an NVIDIA GPU (Łukasz Wojniłowicz, Frameworks 5.100. 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

29 thoughts on “These weeks in KDE: Akademy and Plasma 5.26”

  2. Good work as always, thanks! Can the KWrite splash open/new document screen be made optional please? I prefer the current behaviour of opening to a blank new document & if I want a previous document I’d have navigated to it already in Dolphin or get it via the menu; File>Open recent.

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    4. Ah good, I am now happy. See how easy we are to please? 🙂

      Side thought: does anyone know of a *dedicated* RTF editor for linux? (No, LO or AbiWord will not do; they make the most ugly bloated code imaginable, and I don’t always have my cleanup tools handy.)

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    5. Me too, exactly this. Please, make this splash-open screen optional, for both Kate and KWrite. Most of the time such screens just get in my way.

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    6. +1. I think this dialog is unnecessary as one can already access everything normally and an empty document is what one usually need. At least it can be turned off.

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  3. I need to replace my monitor, your screenshots make Plasma look so pretty. 1080p in 23′ is not a good idea.

    Glad to see it all coming together. By the time Plasma 6 comes around the Wayland session will be excellent. I only use Wayland.

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    1. I’m using a Gateway2000 VX900 at 1600×1200 I bought around 1997 😉 and a LG /w 1080p. Still working … knock on wood.

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  4. Many thanks to all the developers and to you Nate for the great effort and the excelent software. I am not power user but sometimes i read articles about technology. I read that mozilla is working with A.I. in their bugzilla maybe it would help kde. Also some kde programs use coverity scan. I was reading your post about bugs and i googled for tools that help, then again by googling i found that krita uses coverity. I wonder if it would be useful in plasma(don’t ask me what coverity does, i hope it helps with bugs.

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  5. Great news regarding Ghostwriter! Tried it in the past and it’s a nice application.

    That being said, I’m slightly surprised about this “Ghostwriter is now a KDE app!”. Don’t take me wrong, I think it’s a great addition to the flock. I just don’t remember it mentioned on the community mailing list and it’s not listed at all the in incubator on the community wiki.

    The incubation process served us well in the past to ease new projects join and happily stick around. I don’t want Ghostwriter to be robbed of it, it’d be great to help them integrate as best as we can like others in the past.

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    1. I adming I wasn’t following that… did it skip kdereview or did I just miss it?

      Or maybe I announced it early

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    2. I don’t know… For sure it’s not there:
      https://community.kde.org/Incubator/Incubated_Projects

      And I can’t find anything in my archives of kde-community and kde-core-devel lists. I guess someone has been setting up their repo and website though. They likely have a contact who somehow didn’t know about the incubator.

      Sounds like it needs some investigation on how it didn’t end up in the incubator. 😉

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    4. Aha, looks like Carl is its sponsor, but I guess it hasn’t fully passed through kdereview yet. I saw the website and assumed this was a done deal! Whoops. I’ll edit the post.

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  6. “When you unmount a removable device in Dolphin, its Eject button..” -> i believe you linked to this video twice in the blog post, the first video is supposed to be for another bug fix 🙂

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  7. Thank you very much for fixing the Networks plasmoid jumping around while typing the wifi password (which can be quite long) ! this was a very bad user experience, which happens likely when installing a new OS and give a bad taste of it immediately.

    Now, using the WPS protocol for connexion would be very convenient ! (GNOME have it). I have opened a bug about this : https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=459277

    Overall, great job KDE 🙂

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  8. “Fixed an issue that could occasionally cause apps like VLC and Firefox to stop refreshing after being used for a while” … I’ve been struggling with this bug for weeks!! and I didn’t know the causes, thanks!

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  10. “Various System Monitor graphs no longer blink, stutter, and freeze when using an NVIDIA GPU” … cool! I was just noticing that very same thing on the same driver, and glad to hear it’s fixed 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

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  14. This is the worst Plasma release I have ever experienced. Constant freezing. I can’t believe you actually released this garbage without proper QA.

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  16. Aguardando retorno do cubo no kde! O efeito cubo, é parte da história do linux, é quase uma marca registrada! Tomara que logo volte!

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