While we hammer away at polishing up Plasma 5.27, features and user interface changes are starting to land for Plasma 6! We took a big bite out of the 15-minute bugs, too. Goodies for everyone!
New Features
System Settings’ Default Applications page now lets you choose your preferred application for a much wider variety of file types! (Méven Car, Plasma 6.0. Link):
Throughout Kirigami-based apps, standard list items with elided text now display a tooltip on hover showing the full text (Ivan Tkachenko, Frameworks 5.103. Link)
User Interface Improvements
Elisa now increments a song’s play count when it finishes playing, not when it starts (Frisco Smit, Elisa 23.04. Link)
The accent color picking UI has been condensed to it takes up less space, which opens up room for us to add other settings there in the future, such as day/night color scheme switching, which is in progress! (Tanbir Jishan, Plasma 6.0. Link):
The OSD that appears when you switch audio devices now also shows the battery level of the new audio device you switched to (if that device has a battery and reports battery info, of course) (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.0. Link):
Framed views with rounded corners in QtQuick-based software no longer have tiny “korners”-style visual glitches in the corners (Ivan Tkachenko, Frameworks 5.103. Link):
Significant Bugfixes
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
Using a keyboard shortcut to close a window by dragging it around no longer causes it to leave a ghostly non-interactive shadow of itself hanging around (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.27. Link)
Upgrades of Flatpak runtimes with have a new version available are once again marked as such appropriately in Discover, rather than being listed as a “refresh” of the existing version (though that’s still possible too) (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27. Link)
Viewing System Settings’ Application Style page no longer sometimes causes the CPU usage to spike when certain 3rd-party application styles are installed (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0. Link)
Fixed two issues with Plasma panel widget pop-up placement that could cause popups to be inappropriately centered on their panels when using a multi-monitor setup or when the panel is not maximized to take up all available space on its screen edge (Niccolò Venerandi, Frameworks 5.103. Link)
Spectacle’s “Copy to clipboard right after taking a screenshot” feature once again works in the Plasma Wayland session (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.103. Link)
In QtQuick-based software, it’s no longer possible to drag things around in scrollable views that shouldn’t be draggable, like items in sidebars and lists (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.103. Link)
Fixed a ton of little miscellaneous glitches with scrollbars in QtQuick-based software (Ivan Tkachenko, Frameworks 5.103. Link)
Other bug-related information of interest:
- 9 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 42 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 51 last week). Current list of bugs
- 108 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs
Automation & Systematization
Updated the included documentation for System Settings’ Global Themes, Colors, Cursors, Desktop Session, Plasma Search, Task Switcher, Screen Edges, General behavior pages! (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27. Link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, link 9)
Added documentation for Aurorae window decorations! (Natalie Clarius. 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
Please test the Plasma 5.27 beta! Bug reports filed against the beta version (5.26.90) get looked at and prioritized. It really helps. And of course, if you’re a developer, fixing those bugs is massively impactful too. You might also want to 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!
And finally, KDE can’t work without financial support, so consider making a donation today!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
> System Settings’ Default Applications page now lets you choose your preferred application for a much wider variety of file types! (Méven Car, Plasma 6.0. Link):
Nice! Though IMO Default Applications and File Associations really should be side-by-side in the sidebar instead of being separated by a mostly-unrelated Locations menu. And maybe Default Applications can have a link at the bottom to open File Associations page, a la Windows “Related Settings” links. Just my two cents.
> Spectacle’s “Copy to clipboard right after taking a screenshot” feature once again works in the Plasma Wayland session (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.103. Link)
Also very nice — I rely on screenshot copy-to-clipboard in my workflow, it would be very frustrating for that to not work. Thank you!
> Elisa now increments a song’s play count when it finishes playing, not when it starts (Frisco Smit, Elisa 23.04. Link)
I don’t remember if it was foobar2000, iTunes, or one of the scrobbler I used, but I remember being able to set threshold for how long a song’s played before it’s counted in the play count.
Which sorta make sense; you might be browsing your library while listening to something and because you want to move to a song you saw while browsing you immediately hit play as soon as the current song is at the Outro.
I feel like that should be counted in the play count — so maybe it should be “once it hits 80-90% played” or something? idk, just a thought that came to mind when I saw this update.
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Yes. My exact thought was — now that I have all the default applications in one place, I’d like to have an immediate compare of the file associations. This might be an optional pane in the same window.
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The idea for Plasma 6 is to make the “File Associations” page a sub-page of the “Default Applications” page. In order to do that, it needs to be ported to QML first, though.
Merging them into one would be quite a UI challenge as each page has a fundamentally different data model: the default Applications Page shows a curated list of broad file type groupings (and not even all of them, not by a long shot) while the File Associations page shows a list of all file types.
Might not be impossible, but not easy either.
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is wayland mouse gestures support visible over the horizon?
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Sadly, as seen in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=436627 it doesn’t seem to be. Apparently, Wayland limitations are interfering again.
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Carmeline Kiran
thanks for the insight!
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Really great to see System Settings’ Default Applications page with a wider variety of types to choose from. When I set up Kubuntu on friends’ laptops, I often just want to set a single app for all video types, for example, instead of micro-managing file associations.
It’s also a breath of fresh air to see that there is updated documentation for System Settings! Way to go!
Lots of excellent detail work here as always.
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Hi Nate,
Was testing out Frameworks 6 builds with kdesrc-build, and I’m surprised at the number of Frameworks libraries that just die with the likes of “CMake Error: The INTERFACE_QT_MAJOR_VERSION property of “Qt5::Core” does not agree with the value of QT_MAJOR_VERSION already determined for .”
I don’t have the finger-power to type out bug reports for each and every broken Framework library, lol. I gave up just a minute ago at 5 or 6.
Then I remember your blog post existed, so I thought I’d reply here, as that would get visibility for this.
Hopefully these little annoyances can be squashed, but I don’t know enough about the weirdnesses of CMake to know how to fix them myself.
Cheers,
Kyle
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Actually, it seems like a good number of Plasma app builds are also dying with the same error. Like Baloo, for example.
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Sounds like you’re trying to build Frameworks master without Qt 6 installed. You need to build the kf5 branch if you want to get the Qt 5 version. You need to add `branch-group kf5-qt5` into the `globals` section of your kdesrc-buildrc file.
The #kde-devel Matrix room is a better place to ask for help with this sort of thing; folks there can guide yo better than I can!
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Hi Nate,
I do have a kf5-qt5 build, but was curious about the status of where Plasma 6 is build-wise.
Seems I wasn’t aware that branch-group kf6-qt6 had finally become a thing. Switching my config over to that allowed things to work, happily enough. 🙂
Cheers,
Kyle
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The current state of git master which will become Plasma s is still using Qt 5 right now. It has not been made to require Qt 6 yet. We’re still focusing on getting Plasma 5.27 out the door.
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> The OSD that appears when you switch audio devices
What, this is in the middle of the screen on purpose? I thought it was just a misplaced mixer tooltip.
Idea: Make this the sound volume popup, just with the device info as well. That way you can also see the volume level of the new device and it doesn’t look like a tooltip that was misplaced in the middle of the screen.
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Due to my laptop dying, I will not be using KDE Plasma for the next few months. Instead I’ll be using OS X on a M1 Macbook loaned to me.
The thing that struck me most is that OS X actually has much of the same configurability, but it is elegantly hidden away, contexualised, or revealed with modifier keys. KDE in 2023 has become far far too busy and cluttered. To give 2 examples:
a) The bluetooth “system tray” is a very simple readable list of devices with connection status and battery life. KDE, on the other hand, has all sorts of symbols, submenus, and options cluttering up the place. Do I really need to know that my Sony headphones offer SBC, SBC-XQ, AAC, LDAC, etc etc. in a mini menu in the system tray? That should be in system preferences.
b) The Finder (Dolphin equivalent) has toolbar icon groups which collapse/expand as you make the window smaller/larger. I know that GTK4+ has started to have this capability, would be nice to see on KDE too.
TL-DR: OS X enables me to maintain the same workflow as KDE but in a far more decluttered environment.
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Then likely best if you just stick with macOS instead. As no. KDE won’t become another macOS clone.
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I see you skipped over my comment and went straight for fanboi rage mode. I can’t run kde at the moment as I literally have no hardware that will run it.
Neither of my examples are particularly intrinsic to OS X in fact in the 2nd I reference gnome.
There’s nothing stopping kde become better by adopting ideas from other OSs, as it has done many times over the years. I think Nate is keen on decluttering too. He does mention it on occasion.
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Actually no. You like macOS better. There is nothing wrong if you continue to use it. With Linux you can use GNOME or elementary OS. There is no real need for KDE to “declutter” itself. Whatever that means anyway. There is really no need for each and every desktop environment to do the same thing. KDE is a mature and modern desktop environment. No need to change that.
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Where did I say Mac OS was better? You seem determined to turn this into some kind of fanboi war.
But I like using KDE, and will return to it when I have the funds to buy a laptop.
KDE developers already declutter the UI now and then. To give one example, the right click menu in Dolphin at one point was enormously long. Now it isn’t. So you are wrong.
There’s no rule that a DE can’t copy another to better itself. I’ll give another example. For accented letters in Latin scripts in OS X you simply hold down the character and a little pop up menu shows up. I typed àáâäæãåā really easily. KDE copied this great feature about 2 years ago. Unfortunately it was later removed (not quite sure why – Nate?). Now you have to memorise multi-keystrokes for each accented character – slower and annoying.
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No need to be defensive about Plasma. MacOS is pretty awesome, and there are definitely things we can and do learn from it.
I’m curious to hear specific examples of where MacOS has as much configurability as Plasma but it feels organized better. Could you provide some? The ones you gave don’t involve configurability at all but rather basic presentation in #1 and UI adaptability in #2. #2 is something we do already have in fact, but only in QtQuick-based apps. You see it in apps like System Monitor and Elisa.
The “hold key to get accented characters” thing ultimately got reverted because it wasn’t implemented in an ideal way and broke other things, most notably input methods. This was not acceptable, and nobody could figure out how to re-implement it in a way that made it play nicely with them. If I recall, the conclusion was that we needed some methof of chain-loading input methods so that you had more than one running at once, and each could fall back to another one if a keypress type was handled by one and not another. This was really really really hard to do though, and it just never got done.
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I see. You like KDE better then macOS. And can’t wait to return to KDE. You see. That is on why we need to “protect” KDE form time to time. From the outside influence. To keep it a preferred choice for people that want to continue to use a feature full and modern desktop oriented environment. As more or less all other options gave in to what some perceive as “decluttered” desktop environment. And “touch” friendly too? Whatever that is suppose to be. So sure KDE can from time to time copy some good things from other desktop environments. But you personally prefer KDE over macOS. Hence better to suggest to macOS people a thing or two they could copy from KDE. For macOS not to be that anemic.
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Hi Nate, proving a little difficult as I can’t make a side-by-side comparison at the moment. But for sure I will collect a few thoughts up. Where would be a good forum to post them?
On 1) the logic is that most users will choose the best quality codec for their audio device (in my case LDAC), perhaps occasionally switching to a worse quality codec that allows bidirectional mic+speaker for teleconferencing (e.g. mSBC or CVSD). So the system tray should have 2 options at max. If you really needed a worse quality monodirectional audio codec, put that in system preferences.
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Forgive me for throwing a little problem I have:
Having in the taskbar the applications menu, when I press the Meta key the menu opens automatically, it toggles open/close. Is there any way to remove this behavior? I use the Meta key for other things
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Plasma 5.27 looks like a nice release, I reported a couple of bugs that have already been fixed, so I can’t wait for the stable version.
Unfortunately I have seen that this bug is still present https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=451889
I thought it was a simple fix, I also tried to figure out if I could fix it myself, but I don’t have the skills and I haven’t found much documentation.
Let’s hope with Plasma 6….
Thanks to all for the excellent work.
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Again, what an amazing week ! Big congrats to the whole team, you all rock!
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Can someone explain what is wrong with Telegram under Wayland? It is not able to remember it’s windows position. And if to run it or any other app under XWayland than kwin isnn’t correctly switches between windows which under XWayland and Wayland: I should minimize XWayland window to work with wayland window.
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Windows aren’t allowed to set their own positions on Wayland. Any such feature to do this needs to be implemented centrally, in the compositor itself. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15329.
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I also have problems with the taskbar icon. It doesn’t show up when Telegram is autostarted. I have to launch again to have it.
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Hello Nate, tell, is there any progress in the new icons, can we see them in Kde Plasma 6?
I understand this is a difficult and painstaking work, but can we, at least in part, see the new icons that were planned, even then, in the roadmap for 2022?
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See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVLXug8YhPk for an explanation of the current situation.
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Thank you.
Also, in the next Plasma, will there be a breeze theme or will it be a new theme?
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I really hope the new nice icons/folders that were being worked on will appear in Plasma 6. Don’t know the underlying drama in the matter and my spoiled brat-mind doesn’t care, I want the icons. Whoever made the icon developer mad needs to man up and apologize. Shipping Plasma 6 with these age old boring and fugly ones would be such a letdown and major bummer of olympic proportions… This is not Linux Mint you know. So, fingers crossed!
Yeah, save me from those “you can install any icons you want” comments. That’s not the point. Plasma 6 is a major flagship moment and the default look needs to kick ass. We’re on a mission to haul in the disappointed Windows users here..
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There was no drama and nobody upset the fellow working on the new icons; he simply disappeared. It happens. We’re talking about volunteers here, not paid designers.
That said, Niccolò is working on recovering and restarting the work. Check out his video on the topic at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVLXug8YhPk!
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Just watched the video. Quite a rabbithole situation there.. I realize there’s not enough time to get that stuff in Plasma 6, just no way.. So what about just the folders that one sees in the Home section, not changing a million foldertype icons but just the main Home view ones? Is that doable? Like a super lame cover up yes, but still visually important. You know, the windows-way! =)
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I hope they will not make the same mistake they are doing with all major updates: loosing functionality. It’s can’t be more annoying when I’m loosing half of features after an upgrade. Plasma 6.0 should be more than Plasma 5.27. Especially if the product strength is those features which lost for a while. It did happen with Plasma 4: oh boy, that was a huge disappointment. I had to wait till version 4.2 to be able to start work with it again. Almost same was with Plasma 5… 5.12 was acually in pair with the latest 4.x. In both cases, it was very hard to work with the old versions, due to removal from the distribution repositories. M company expects me to update everything all the time… So please don’t rush this one…
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