This week Spectacle’s user interface was rewritten in QML, which makes it easier to develop going forward and will enable us to add screen recording functionality to the app, which is coming! But that’s not all… in the process we integrated the annotations feature into the Rectangular Region selector, so you can select a screen region and immediately start annotating it! The Rectangular Region selector UI is also hugely more responsive. Overall this work was also able to fix 12 bug reports in the bug tracker, in addition to the important architectural and UI improvements.
Thanks very much to Noah Davis and Marco Martin who have been hard at work on this for quite a while! It will land in Spectacle 23.04.
Other New Features
There are now KWin actions for “Move window one screen to the left/right/up/down” that you can use and assign keyboard shortcuts to, if your personal workflow requires it (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27. Link)
Other User Interface Improvements
The Bluetooth widget’s tooltip now shows the battery status for any connected device that are able to report battery information (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27. Link):
The Battery and Brightness and Media Player widgets’ tooltips now indicate that you can do something by scrolling over them. This should be all of them! (me: Nate Graham and Nicolai Weitkemper, Plasma 5.27. Link 1 and link 2)
The System Tray config window’s list of applets has been made fully keyboard-navigable and accessible (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link)
The estimated time remaining before your battery runs out is now smoothed, so it won’t jarringly jump up or down in response to momentary spikes or dips in power usage (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link)
Scrolling over a Media Player widget to adjust the volume of the app playing media now raises or lowers it in increments equal to the global scroll step that’s configurable in System Settings, rather than having its own private setting for this (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27. Link)
Side drawers in Kirigami-based apps can now also be closed by using the Escape key or clicking in an empty dimmed area of the view (Matej Starc, Frameworks 5.102. Link)
Significant Bugfixes
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
When Plasma- Browser Integration is installed, the Media Player no longer shows two sets of playback controls (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 5.27. Link)
In the Plasma Wayland session, several subtle paste-related issues have been fixed, including panel widgets having a delay before closing after a file is copied in Dolphin and then Dolphin is closed, and also text copied by interacting with the Clipboard widget itself being unable to be pasted into text fields in Plasma widgets (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.102. Link 1 and link 2)
When you remove a widget and then reboot the system or restart plasmashell while the “Undo removing this widget?” notification is still visible, the widget is now gone as expected when Plasma starts up again (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.102. Link)
Other bug-related information of interest:
- 6 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 7 last week). Current list of bugs
- 46 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 47 last week). Current list of bugs
- 102 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs
Automation & Systematization
Our Bugzilla bot now automatically marks bugs with the “wishlist” severity if the author forgot to do so themselves, but did prefix the title with various keywords like “feature request”, “wishlist”, and the like (me: Nate Graham. Link)
Added an autotest to ensure that the Plasma desktop’s wallpaper size remains correct after screen resolutions change, after it regressed and we fixed it (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. 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
KDE’s end-of-year fundraiser is in full swing, so please consider making a donation! We’re halfway to our goal of 20,000€ with 3 weeks left to go. Help us get all the way there so we can continue to ramp up technical hiring!
If you’re a developer, check out our 15-Minute Bug Initiative. Working on these issues makes a big difference quickly!
Otherwise, visit 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!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
The Spectacle update sounds awesome. I used to use Flameshot but after seeing it having problems dealing with Wayland, I’d decided to just use Spectacle instead in preparation for an eventual move to Wayland.
To my luck, not long after I do so, I saw great updates like the annotation tools on Gwenview and found that you can easily drag-and-drop the shortcut to my panel, that fills my main reason for using Flameshot.
This one pretty much means all my reason for using Flameshot is covered, though I think a Spectacle widget would be awesome, but it’s not necessary given you can just the same as drag-and-dropping the Spectacle shortcut to panel.
> 46 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 47 last week).
I’ve been thinking about it for a while, maybe this can be rewritten as “46 15-minute Plasma bugs (x bugs fixed, y new bugs confirmed, down from 47 last week)”. It would give a more tangible sense of progress of bugs getting worked out, instead of seeming like it’s all 47 bugs from the first day of 15-minute bugs initiative and nothing or only 1 was fixed every week.
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The number often changes around based on bug triaging; for example the one VHI bug removed this week was actually fixed 3 weeks ago, but at the time we didn’t realize that the change in question (which was made to fix something else) actually fixed it. Honestly breaking down everything in a really detailed manner is exhaustingly time-consuming to do, and I think simply posting the current vs last week’s numbers does a better job of showing the overall momentum. If you care about the nitty-gritty details, it may be a sign that you would like bug triage and could look into helping out with it. 🙂
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Great work! This is really nice. Spectacle looks more easier to use 🙂
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Nice to see the annotation tool moved away from the image visually! The other day I had trouble seeing where the image ended and the annotation tools started (it was an image of a window with many controls of its own).
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I like this attention to details like improving tooltips, etc.
Recently I tried the latest Neon Unstable and thought “yeah, compared to Kubuntu 17.10 the progress is overwhelming”.
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This should be taken into account with the fact that Kubuntu 17.10/18.04 were actually the firsrt distros after a long period since KDE 3 during which KDE and Plasma were a totally unusable mess.
I mean no average user would have tolerated Plasma crashes back in those days, and suddenly it had become okay-ish. But now it feels like it’s almost as good as KDE 3.
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Oooh, I am looking forward to screen recording in Spectacle. It will be nice to have a simpler tool than OBS.
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I feel the same way! OBS is definitely overkill for my (and I imagine most people’s) simple screen recording needs.
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The annotation update to Spectacle looks amazing! I’ve been using flameshot and love the workflow, but they seem to consider screenrecordings out of scope for their project and apparently it doesn’t work well with Wayland as well (not that I would know with my nvidia GPU). So hearing that there will be both, immediate annotations and screenrecordings dropping soon makes me very happy!
PS: Written on a Pinephone running Plasma Mobile – step by step getting closer to world domination 😉
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Really excited to hear that Spectacle will be getting recording feature. It’s one of the things that I actually liked about Gnome desktop since the shell, as you could always easily record your screen. Soon KDE will be able to do that easily as well, woot! 🥳 It’s a great feature for marketing the DE if you think about it.
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I’ve started to use Linux/Kde Neon on a daily basis at work as well. Some bugs /missing features are really annoying even for me, as a power user:
1. Dragging a folder/file in Dolphin should rearrange them inside the folder. Instead Dolphin offers to copy/cut the files.. This is the wrong behavior and should be fixed.
2.Auto-mount a partition should really be set by right clicking the partition inside Dolphin. Instead it is hidden inside the Settings Menu at Removable Storage. This is really annoying when you try to program a Raspberry Pi Pico with Arduino IDE for example.
3.Format a partition using right click in Dolphin….Some users really miss this one…
4. Right click on a file/folder, create shortcut. This need to happen for productivity reasons.
Other than these , Kde is amazing! some bugs in Wayland /Virtualbox prevent me for using Wayland… But still better than Win overall.
Good luck KDE team!
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Have you checked if these bugs already exist in the kde bugzilla and if not to report them.
This is not the correct place to report bugs and expect them to be fixed.
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“Kavalor:
Have you checked if these bugs already exist in the kde bugzilla and if not to report them.
This is not the correct place to report bugs and expect them to be fixed.”
They are not bugs, but shortcomings /wrong behavior if you ask me.
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> There are now KWin actions for “Move window one screen to the left/right/up/down” that you can use and assign keyboard shortcuts to, if your personal workflow requires it (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27. Link)
Thanks for this. This was inconvenient for a long time – Meta + Shift + arrow moved windows to wrong monitors, not taking into account the physical relation. Now that is fixed. Thank you Natalie. KDE Rocks!
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Would it be possible to have each element (app window, wallpaper, …) At a separate image layer so you can edit this elements with Krita or Gimp?
You could move the windows turn them on/off, … and for regular users there will be no difference cause it’s a simple image.
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Hi,
If it wasn’t affecting me (and tons of other people) and if these were separate incidents, I wouldn’t believe. But now I am getting suspicious. Very suspicious. Fool me once? OK. Fool me twice? Maybe. But third time, well … I don’t belive in coincidences.
So what happened:
First, KDE removed support of Alliance for Open Media AVIF (SDDM, Login, Wallpaper, Gwenview, Dolphin, …);
Second KDE removed support for ALL RAW types of files- like Sony ARW, Nicon NEF, and so on (Gwenview);
Third KDE removed support for photos in Okular- epub files are missing photos rendering documents useless (unlike mupdf, which is fine)
Don’t tell me that someone isn’t being paid by MS there in KDE e.v. What is going on?
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As far as I can tell, all of your issues are caused by distro mis-packaging, upstream code errors, or problems with your personal setup. That’s been the general resolution of the rude and accusatory bug reports you’ve filed about these issues. Everyone can see for themselves at https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=CONFIRMED&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=NEEDSINFO&bug_status=VERIFIED&bug_status=CLOSED&email1=kdelovaa%40mozej.com&emailreporter1=1&emailtype1=substring&list_id=2231174&query_format=advanced&resolution=—&resolution=FIXED&resolution=INVALID&resolution=WONTFIX&resolution=LATER&resolution=REMIND&resolution=DUPLICATE&resolution=WORKSFORME&resolution=MOVED&resolution=UPSTREAM&resolution=DOWNSTREAM&resolution=WAITINGFORINFO&resolution=BACKTRACE&resolution=UNMAINTAINED.
The idea of some Microsoft spy sabotaging KDE is the product of deluded paranoia. We have Git; all code activities are immutably recorded in public forever. I challenge you to find the commits by this alleged Microsoft saboteur. Even if you were right and had indeed uncovered some secret plot, clearly MS chose the stupidest, least effective person for the job since randomly breaking some KDE apps’ abilities to open certain file formats is not exactly going to torpedo KDE, and can be easily noticed and fixed.
I’m getting pretty sick of your negative nonsense and will delete any further comments that are rude and accusatory. If you keep accusing people doing free work for the good of humanity of malicious motives in bug reports, I’ll have sysadmins disable your Bugzilla account.
Let’s not let it get there. Please start being nicer. Not that I expect you to; I fully expect you to escalate and deluge me with hate mail and then I’ll retaliate by blocking your IP and filtering your emails into the trash and then I’ll have sysadmins disable your bugzilla account and any other sockpuppet accounts you create (because your abrasive style is 100% recognizable). What a waste of both our time that sounds like. Maybe, for a nice change of pace, surprise me. Be nice. Grow as a person instead of sinking ever deeper into paranoia. The ball’s in your court. Where do you want to hit it? Shall we fight, or shall we do something productive in this magnificent global collaborative software project we all hold dear?
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