This week in KDE: end-of-year goodies

This Week in KDE 3 Minutes

Welp, 2022 draws to a close, but KDE never sleeps, and its developers have managed to whip up some new years’ treats for everyone!

New Features

Info Center can now show you OpenCL info on its own new dedicated page, if you have the clinfo utility installed (Linus Dierheimer, Plasma 5.27. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, KWin now sends along pen tilt and rotation events to apps (Joshua Goins, Plasma 5.27. Link)

User Interface Improvements

The way KRunner displays information about time zones has been substantially improved, making it easier to parse the output, and fixing a couple of bugs (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27. Link):

  • You can now find a timezone by its short name or offset name
  • Time zone information for whole countries now shows all regional time zones within them
  • When searching for a time zone code used by multiple actual time zones, it now shows them all
  • Asking for the date now shows that date’s offset from your local time
  • Asking for the time now displays that time’s offset from your current time if relevant
  • Text for long results now wraps rather than eliding

When Night Color hasn’t been turned on yet, clicking on its System Tray icon now takes you directly to its System Settings page where you can turn it on and set it up to your liking (Guilherme Marçal Silva, Plasma 5.27. Link)

A few pages in System Settings are starting to use a new way of organizing logical sections, which hopefully should make things easier to find (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27. Link 1 and link 2):

When using the default Sidebar view, System Settings sidebar items no longer show tooltips on hover, since this information is not very useful and gets in the way a lot (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Discover now presents details for system updates when using the “Offline Updates” feature in a better way (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27. Link):

Typing a space while searching in the Overview effect now always actually enters a space character, instead of activating the highlighted window when a window that matches the search term (Niklas Stephanblome, Plasma 5.27. Link)

Critical notifications no longer appear in the Overview, Present Windows, and Desktop Grid effects (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.26.5. Link)

You can now configure the Task Manager to show window previews when you click on a grouped task even if you’ve disabled the feature to always show window previews when hovering over tasks (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.)

Using KDE Connect to transfer files over 2 GB in size is now possible (Adrian Thiele, Frameworks 5.102. Link)

The “Always use Touch Mode” setting now persists after a reboot (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.102. Link)

Fixed a case where KWin could crash in the Plasma Wayland session when connecting a laptop to a docking station (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.26.5. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Added an autotest to test for weird character handling in wallpaper file paths, after it broke again and we fixed it (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27. Link)

There’s now a bot that announces relevant data about Plasma bugs in the Plasma chatroom every day (Justin Zobel):

…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

Thanks so much for helping KDE reach its goal during the end-of-year fundraiser! In fact, we’ve smashed through it, currently raising over 23,000€ of the 20k we were shooting for. Every little bit helps, especially given KDE e.V’s ambitious hiring goals. We can’t reach and sustain them without you, so thanks a ton, everyone!

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!

Published by Nate

Published

15 thoughts on “This week in KDE: end-of-year goodies”

  1. The new separators in System Settings a U turn IMO. There was a time when Plasma was full of separators and its look was considered old and cluttered, then fortunately the KDE folks began removing them. I think they’re now introducing a regression here.

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    1. Personally, I think the section titles could be Left Aligned. I think that would make it much easier to read, which would make it easier to find the right section.

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    4. Overall, I think it’s an improvement. I just looked at how the setting screens look in 5.26 and the way it’s shown here seems clearer to me.

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  2. I am currently playing around with KDE Plasma under openSUSE Tumbleweed. KDE Plasma has developed very well. I can still remember when it was very unpolished. It just looked bad and inconsistent, even though many Linuxers don’t seem to have an eye for it or aren’t really bothered by it. That’s no longer the case. KDE Plasma looks polished. I think Nate has played a big part in this huge improvement in it. There are many good features. Great.

    I just tried out Elisa. Unfortunately I am a bit disappointed. Basically, I like Elisa. But I have to notice that Elisa ignores my music on my server, although the share is included and recognized. Local playback of music works.
    Unfortunately, no replay gain works so far. I have not tried gapless playback yet.

    If I use more KDE Plasma now, I will try to report bugs on the official channels.

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  3. Using KDE Connect to transfer files over 2 GB in size is now possible (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 5.102. Link)

    Oh boy, then this was a bug?
    But I’m my case, as the transfer speed is too slow within my household Wi-Fi, its still better to use a thumb drive.

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    1. Oh, I forgot to mention.
      When you send a file from the computer to the phone, not problems. But when I send a file from the phone to the computer, there is a problem. Problem is, the file’s name is lost. Instead the file goes to the computer with a random sequence of numbers as it’s name.
      So, a bug?

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  4. Wow, what an amazing year is has been for KDE and every week comes with its load of treats !

    I’m having a bug currently on plasma 5.26 but don’t know how to search for more info. The shell crashes every now and then and restarts right after (it just looks glitchy for 2 seconds as the panel disappear and reappear and the desktop turns black before coming back.) But there’s no Dr Konqi report on that and don’t know where to find useful info to write a bug report. Can anyone tell me where I can look in my system to see what went wrong when plasma crashes?

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  5. It seems only the default breeze aurorae theme won’t be blurry given fractional scaling enabled on KDE Wayland session. Why are other aurorae themes looking blurry under Wayland fractional scaling?

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