This week in KDE: Humongous UI improvements

This week we have a lot of large and impactful user interface improvements across multiple apps and Plasma, not to mention progress on the big bugs!

New Features

Dragon Player–KDE’s venerable minimalistic video and audio player–has undergone a major UI overhaul, including adopting KHamburgerMenu and a welcome screen, a streamlined and more intuitive set of default toolbar buttons, and less glitchy behavior when opening videos in the Plasma Wayland session (Harald Sitter, Dragon Player 23.04, Link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, and link 6):

There’s still a bit more polishing to do, but now this app is sleek as hell!

Filelight now has a list view on the left side of the window, providing a simple text-based method of viewing size information. This also fixes multiple bugs with the tooltips and eliminates blurriness in the radial graph view! (Harald Sitter, Filelight 23.04. Link):

Ark now supports extracting Stuffit .sit archives (Elvis Angelaccio, Ark 23.04. Link)

There’s now a new “Touchscreen” page in System Settings that lets you disable touchscreens and choose which physical screen their input gets mapped to (Nicolas Fella, sponsored by TU Dresden, Plasma 5.27. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, screens now get a default scale factor that more appropriately matches their DPI, based on what kind of device they are (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27. Link)

You can now autostart apps multiple times (e.g. to launch multiple instances of it) and it also shows you the paths where autostarted scripts live (Thenujan Sandramohan, Plasma 5.27. Link)

You can now configure Folder View to show hidden files if you want (Willyanto, Plasma 5.27. Link)

System Settings’ Drawing ‘Tablet’ page now lets you map physical buttons on your drawing tablet’s pen to keyboard shortcuts (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27. Link)

User Interface Improvements

When you unlock the screen by providing your fingerprint, you no longer have to redundantly click an “Unlock” button afterwards (Janet Blackquill, Plasma 5.26.4. Link)

The way you choose or change a location in the Weather widget is now simpler and more direct (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.27. Link)

When using the Canadian weather provider, the Weather widget’s layout is now much better and clearer, and no longer sometimes gets visually cut off (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.27. Link):

On System Settings’ Users page, the way you choose fingers to use for fingerprint authentication is now much more visually intuitive. In addition, you can now un-enroll individual fingers, and when you change your password, you’ll no longer see the “passwords don’t match” message until after you click the “Set Password” button, or a few seconds after you stop typing (Janet Blackquill and Devin Lin, Plasma 5.27. Link 1, link 2, and link 3):

On System Settings’ Display Configuration page, screens are now required to be touching and not partially overlapping, which prevents various weird bugs from being able to happen (David Redondo, Plasma 5.27. Link)

The Audio Volume widget’s tooltip no longer unnecessarily tells you that output is playing on “Speaker” when there’s only one output device, and instead mentions the fact that you can scroll over the icon to change the volume (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27. Link 1 and link 2):

Breeze-themed Plasma popups now have a larger corner radius that matches the corner radius for windows (Niccolò Venerandi, Frameworks 5.101. Link):

The Breeze Icon theme now includes a themed icon for SimpleScreenRecorder (Manuel Jesús de la Fuente, Frameworks 5.101. Link):

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, tapping a touchscreen after disconnecting an external screen no longer crashes KWin (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.26.4. Link)

Plasma notifications no longer have inappropriately sharp top corners (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.26.4. Link)

In the Plasma X11 session, disabling compositing no longer leaves an empty area around Plasma Panels (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.26.4. Link)

Searching using the KRunner-powered search in Overview no longer sometimes crashes KWin (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Landed a better fix for the problem of maximized XWayland apps sometimes having a one-pixel empty border on the right screen edge in the Plasma Wayland session (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

6 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 10 last week). Current list of bugs
47 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 50 last week). Current list of bugs
152 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

Added some autotests surrounding Plasma wallpaper loading and assignment (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Added some autotests around the KFileFilterCombo UI component (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.101. KFileFilterCombo. Link)

Changes not in KDE that affect KDE

In QtQuick-based apps, scrollable views where all content fits horizontally no longer shows a pointless horizontal scrollbar anyway. We had previously worked around this bug in most KDE apps, but now it’s fixed upstream so we don’t have to anymore! (David Redondo, Qt 6.4.2, but backported to the KDE Qt patch collection. Link)

…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.

A better fundraising platform

KDE is getting a much more user-friendly fundraising platform, and it’s a big deal!

Currently our small-donor donation page is https://kde.org/community/donations, which lets you make a single one-time donation. To make a recurring donation, you have to visit https://relate.kde.org, which is less user-friendly, and it’s always struck me as odd to have these split up in two locations.

Well, KDE is getting a much better donation system powered by Donorbox, which I hope will turbocharge our fundraising! It’s very user-friendly and allows you to easily make recurring donations, which is important. We already set this up for the Kdenlive fundraiser, and it was a smash hit, raising 100% of the funds in the first month of the 3-month campaign. That fundraiser has since moved into stretch goals!

We’ve now done it again, rolling out a Donorbox-powered donation UI on https://kde.org/bluefriday, our tongue-in-cheek anti-black-friday fundraiser, which will become a general end-of-year campaign. This work was done by members of KDE’s promo team and fundraising working group, principally Lays Rodrigues, Carl Schwan, and Paul Brown. And so far the response has been huge! The fundraiser opened yesterday, and at the time of publication, it’s already collected 530€ from 28 generous donors! And after the new year, the current plan is to continue to use the Donorbox-powered UI for all small donations.

This really goes to show how important user-friendliness is. When you make it easy for people to give you money… they give you more money! Thank you so much, everyone.

Why is all this money stuff so important? Well, it’s how the KDE e.V. pays for hiring (such as for the Platform Software Engineer position I blogged about two days ago), development sprints, conferences, infrastructure, and similar activities that help KDE thrive and grow. If we’re gonna hugely expand technical employment–which is a major goal of mine–then we’re gonna need a lot more recurring donations to do it.

So what are you waiting for? Head over to https://kde.org/bluefriday and make a donation today. If it’s a recurring donation, we’ll love you forever! 🥰

KDE is hiring a software engineer

Yes that’s right folks, it’s happening!!! KDE is growing up, joining the big leagues, and cooking on all burners!

The KDE e.V. recently dipped its toes into the waters of technical hiring by contracting with longtime KDE contributor Ingo Klöcker to maintain and improve KDE’s packaging infrastructure for non-FOSS platforms. Now we’re at it again with a new open position for a “Software Platform Engineer.”

This is an open-ended development position, with responsibilities for work on KDE frameworks, Plasma, Qt, middleware like Pipewire and Wayland protocols–basically, the same things that a lot of people are already doing. But… on a consistent work-work basis, for money, with your KDE friends as professional colleagues and supervisors!

If this interests you, check out the job ad and apply! We want lots of good candidates so we can feel bad about only hiring one person and then feel even more incentivized to open more positions for them too! And we have other open positions as well! So go apply for a career in KDE today!

Of course sustaining these high-pay technical positions won’t be cheap. The KDE e.V. can just barely afford it now, and needs a larger and growing budget to be able to sustainably keep up the pace of hiring. Please donate today! Every little bit helps. If you can swing it, make it an annual donation!

This week in KDE: less-rage-inducing error messages in Discover

This week I’d like to highlight a particular 15-minute bug that got fixed: When Discover shows you significant error messages, they now take the form of normal dialogs rather than tiny little overlays at the bottom of the screen that disappear after a few seconds. And it should now show you fewer un-actionable error messages in general too! These major improvements were contributed by Jakub Narolewski and Aleix Pol Gonzalez, and will show up in Plasma 5.27. Thanks guys!

But that’s not all! There was a lot of work on other significant bugs too, and we managed to knock out several, in addition to landing some welcome features and fixes:

New Features

System Monitor (and widgets of the same name) can now detect and monitor power usage for NVIDIA GPUs (Pedro Liberatti, Plasma 5.27. Link)

You can now show the current temperature in a badge overlay on the Weather widget’s icon–both outside of the System Tray and also for the System Tray version of it! (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.27. Link):

User Interface Improvements

Okular’s scroll speed when using a touchpad is now significantly faster, and should generally match the speed at which everything scrolls when using a touchpad (Eugene Popov, Okular 23.04. Link)

In Discover’s Task Progress sheet, the progress bars are now much more visible and not obscured by a pointless background highlight effect (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26.4. Link):

When changing songs/tracks and the Plasma Media Player widget is visible, there’s no longer a brief flicker that reveals the icon of the app playing the media (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.26.4. Link)

A better error message is now shown when the Bluetooth file transfer service fails to start (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Discover will no longer attempt to check for updates when using a metered internet connection Bernardo Gomes Negri, Plasma 6. Link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

When Konsole is launched after changing the display layout, its main window is no longer absurdly small (Vlad Zahorodnii, Konsole 22.12. Link)

Elisa should no longer stutter occasionally during playback (Roman Lebedev, Elisa 23.04. Link)

When using Latte Dock in the Plasma Wayland session, various windows and Plasma pop-ups are no longer mis-positioned (David Redondo, Latte Dock 0.10.9. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, Plasma should no longer sometimes randomly crash when you move the cursor over a Plasma panel (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.26.4. Link)

When Kickoff is configured to use the default list item size, apps that live in the categories sidebar such as Help Center no longer have an awkwardly large icon (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26.4. Link)

KWin now honors the “Panel Orientation” property that the kernel can set for screens, which means that many different types of devices that need the screen to be rotated by default will now have that done automatically (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Various Plasma UI elements once again have the correct size in the Plasma X11 session when not opting into using Qt scaling (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.100.1. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

10 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 11 last week). Current list of bugs
50 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 51 last week). Current list of bugs
137 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

Wrote a new “Welcome to KDE” page which will also be linked to in our new Welcome Center app that will debut in Plasma 5.27 (me: Nate Graham)

…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

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in KDE: better environment variable support

New Features

KMenuEdit and the properties dialog now make it easy for you to set environment variables when opening your apps. This was always possible, but you had to know the secret special syntax (e.g. Exec=env FOO=1 kate); now the UI makes it easy and explicitly supported (Dashon Wells, Frameworks 5.101 and Plasma 5.27. Link 1 and link 2):

User Interface Improvements

The option to disable the Secret Service interface now clearly explains what this means and why you might want to do it (Guilherme Marçal Silva, KWalletManager 22.12. Link):

Discover no longer shows categories in light text on the app cards because it’s mostly visual noise, and it also once again has an “All Applications” category you can use to see all apps and limit a search to just apps (me: Nate Graham and Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27. Link 1, link 2, and link 3):

When the Battery & Brightness widget is configured to show you the exact charge percentage on its icon, it no longer does so when the battery is fully charged, since this is obvious (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27. Link)

In a variety of scrollable System Settings pages, the separator above the footer buttons now matches the separator above the “Highlight Changed Settings” button on the sidebar’s footer (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.101. Link):

Significant Bugfixes

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

Vertically-arranged monitors are no longer slightly overlapping by one pixel, which can trigger various weirdnesses (Alexander Volkov, Plasma 5.26.4. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

11 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
51 15-minute Plasma bugs (1 more than last week). Current list of bugs
174 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Changes not in KDE that affect KDE

Firefox now supports the xdg_activation_v1 Wayland protocol, which means its windows will be able to raise to the top when a URL is opened in them from another app that also supports the protocol (Emilio Cobos Álvarez, Firefox 108. Link)

…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

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week in KDE: Big brain KRunner

This week KRunner got a lot smarter about its search results. For years people have complained about various things not being the top item when they expect it, so Natalie Clarius and Alexander Lohnau decided to make some major improvements:

System Setting pages whose names exactly match the search term now have much higher weight so they should appear first (Link)
Various other things with an exact names match also now have much higher weight so they should appear first, and also recent files have their relevance reduced according to age (Link)
Entering something like “Time CET” or “Time Shanghai” now shows you not only the time, but also how much earlier or later it is than your current timezone (Link)
The exec= lines of desktop files for Chrome web apps and Flatpak apps no longer inappropriately get matched (Link 1 and link 2)

Thanks a lot, you two!

New Features

Gwenview now lets you change images’ brightness, contrast, and gamma (Ilya Pominov, Gwenview 22.12. Link):

User Interface Improvements

All of the global volume settings have been moved into the System Settings Audio Volume page, and the Audio Volume widget no longer has a separate settings page of its own. So clicking its configure button now takes you to System Settings. In addition, this has provided the opportunity to make the global mute feature truly global, and also make the sliders on the System Settings page only go up to 150% when you’re using the “Raise maximum volume” setting (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27. Link 1, link 2, and link 3):

When using offline updates, you can now use Discover to see the changelogs for individual packages, just like you can with online updates (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Wallpapers in the wallpaper chooser grids you see in various places are now draggable-and-droppable, so you can drag them into image editors to edit them, into a file manager to copy them, and so on (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link)

While on the lock screen, you can now hit the Escape key to turn off the screen and save some power (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27. Link)

When your computer is plugged in and using Performance mode or an app has requested to use Power Save mode, now you can see this right in your System Tray (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27. Link):

Significant Bugfixes

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

Krita now supports using a global menu (Antonio Rojas, Krita 5.1. Link)

Libreswan VPN detection now works if you’re using version 4.9 or greater, and detection for StrongSwan and OpenSwan should be more accurate now too (Douglas Kosovic, Plasma 5.24.8. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, when using the default setting of “Legacy apps scale themselves,” Steam and some other XWayland-using apps now get scaled to the correct and expected size (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.26.3. Link)

Switching between launcher widgets (e.g. Kickoff and Kicker) no longer re-arranges your favorites to be in alphabetical order; their manual ordering is now preserved (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27. Link)

You can once again disable the “Present Windows” effect within the Desktop Grid effect, instead keeping windows where they are and using it as a Virtual Desktop switcher (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.27. Link)

All sorts of KDE apps no longer hang on launch when files in their “Recent documents” lists aren’t accessible for some reason (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 5.100. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

11 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
50 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 56 last week). Current list of bugs
133 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

When building a module using kdesrc-build fails, it now suggests a way for you to install missing build dependencies (Marius Pa. Link)

Added autotests to make sure file thumbnail generation doesn’t regress (Nicolas Fella, kio-extras 22.12. Link)

Added an autotest in KWin to make sure that auto-generated resolutions are generated properly (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Added an autotest in Plasma to make sure windows are correctly mapped to their Task Manager entries (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Web Presence

KDE now has a fancy new “KDE for Creators” website! (Carl Schwan, Nicolas Fella, Áron Kovács, and other folks in the Promo team) This complements the existing “KDE for Kids” page, and we’ll be adding more soon!

kde.org/hardware now much more prominently lists Tuxedo Computers‘ devices, now that they’ve switched to shipping Plasma by default! (Paul Brown, Carl Schwan, and me: Nate Graham, Link):

…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.