It’s become almost a running joke on Phoronix at this point, but this week we do indeed have more Wayland fixes! 🙂 …And other things as well, including some good UI improvements to various KDE apps in addition to the background work of Qt 6 porting that is continuing full steam ahead, and reaching a position of increasing stability. Come see!
User Interface Improvements
Ark’s welcome screen is now richer with features, to be more like the one in Kate (Eugene Popov, Ark 23.04. Link):
Made a few UI improvements to Elisa, such as showing a “Quit” menu item in the hamburger menu when using the System Tray icon feature, correctly returning to the prior window state when exiting full screen mode, and resetting the playback position slider to the beginning when the playlist is manually cleared (Nikita Karpei and me: Nate Graham, Elisa 23.04. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)
Okular’s default toolbar layout has now been tweaked a bit, and now includes the “View Mode” menu by default and also shows the zoom and view buttons on the left side, with the tools on the right side (me: Nate Graham, Okular 23.04. Link 1 and link 2):
When “Fix it for me!”-style actions in the Samba sharing wizard fail, you’re now shown an appropriate error message explaining what went wrong (me: Nate Graham, kdenetwork-filesharing 23.08. Link)
Plasma now exposes global actions for “Restart” and “Shut Down” so you can add keyboard shortcuts to trigger them. We already had the “without confirmation” versions of these actions, but these new ones will ask for confirmation first (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0. Link)
When importing VPN configurations, any errors are now shown in the UI so you can figure out what went wrong and maybe fix it yourself (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.27.3. Link)
While downloading new Flatpak apps, Discover now reports the status as “Downloading” correctly (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)
If your keyboard has an Emoji key, pressing it now opens the Emoji Picker window (Konrad Borowski, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)
Info Center has adopted a flattened sidebar structure so pages no longer live in sub-categories. This should make it easier and faster to access everything (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.0. Link):
When you synchronize your Plasma settings to SDDM, it now also syncs the cursor size (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0. Link)
We no longer misleadingly use Filelight’s icon for the 3rd-party GParted app in the Breeze icon theme (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.105. Link)
Significant Bugfixes
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
Fixed a source of crashes in System Settings when importing VPN configuration files (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.27.3. Link)
Fixed another source of clipboard-related crashes in Plasma (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)
Significantly improved robustness of screen arrangements when using a multi-monitor setup that includes monitors with identical EDID values (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.3. Link)
Significantly improved robustness of Plasma containments’ mapping to screens when using multi-monitor setups (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27.3. Link)
Fixed the way GTK apps scale themselves in the Plasma Wayland session when using multiple screens with different physical DPI values (Luca Bacci, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)
In the Plasma Wayland session, Plasma no longer quits (not crashes!) when an app sends a window title that’s wayyyyy too long (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)
In the Plasma Wayland session, screen recording and Task Manager thumbnails now work properly for users of NVIDIA GPUs with the proprietary drivers (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)
Other bug-related information of interest:
- 13 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 12 last week). Current list of bugs
- 51 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 50 last week). Current list of bugs
- 100 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs
Automation & Systematization
Added a UI test for Discover to test installing and uninstalling apps from the PackageKit backend (Harald Sitter. Link)
Changes not in KDE that affect KDE
In its native Wayland mode, Firefox no longer has an invisible animation that forces the screen to constantly repaint, causing KWin to unnecessarily consume excessive CPU resources (Emilio Cobos Álvarez, Firefox 113, 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 user, upgrade to Plasma 5.27! If your distro doesn’t offer it and won’t anytime soon, consider switching to a different one that ships software closer to its developer’s schedules.
If you’re a developer, consider working on known Plasma 5.27 regressions! 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 other 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! This stuff ain’t cheap and KDE e.V. has ambitious hiring goals. We can’t meet them without your generous donations!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Great news and as always thanks for your work you all! Just want to ask some questions about issues I’m facing right now:
Recently, all my laptops are giving me a slow reboot, waiting for sddm to be terminated. Even a fresh install with just the default options from archinstall. A reboot last between 1:30 minutes and much much more on older installs. Is someone facing a similar issue? I’ve read there and there that SDDM has not being updated since a while, maybe related?
I’m a bit at a loss here because I don’t find meaningful logs about this with journalctl and also because I’m rebooting I don’t exactly have the control of the laptop so I can’t exactly try things.
Also, Plasma was working until recently but now it just fork bomb my computer without me being able to escape it and I just have to hard reboot.
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About slow shutdown, see
* https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=445449
* https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/1476
Should be fixed in the -git version. Hopefully the next release(s) are about soon.
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> I’ve read there and there that SDDM has not being updated since a while
This is the second
> running joke (…) at this point
🙂
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I’ve this issue on both Wayland and X11, so I don’t know if it’s related. And on my old systems I can’t anymore start Wayland. 😶
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These changes are great!
Regarding Info Center: the text says it’s going to land on Plasma 6.0 but the respective screenshot says “Plasma 5.27.3”, which is understandable but a bit funny. Looks easily backportable, doesn’t it?
>>XXX KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week.
xxx instead of 100. A typo or some script fail I suppose?
A big thank you for your work!
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You’re welcome!
Technically it’s backportable. But policy-wise, it’s not because it changes the UI, and we only backport bugfixes.
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Yup, my screenshot on the 5.27 branch. It’s a bit tricky to run and test Plasma 6 right now, so I used 5.27 and rebased it. A simple change like this can exist on both, and actually it can be backported trivially as no strings are changed, but as Nate says, changes like this aren’t.
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Plasma 6 already has so many nice things it makes me want to ask: Can we get Plasma 6 released already?
(it’s a kind of Donkey in Shrek: “are we there yet?”)
Thank you for keeping us updated!
Nate – as an off topic – I’ve reported this: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=466248
Are you aware of anyone else complaining of this or is it “just me”? (It’s really getting into my nerves!)
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Let’s follow up in the bug report. I’ve posted a comment.
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Hey , Thanks for great improvement, Epub support in Okular is really bad , as qt-webengine is dependency of Plasma and is found on every Plasma desktop , please use it for rendering epub.
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“In the Plasma Wayland session, screen recording and Task Manager thumbnails now work properly for users of NVIDIA GPUs with the proprietary drivers (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.27.4. Link)”
HEY wait a minute can Wayland be used with Nvidias now? With prop. drivers??
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Yep, that’s worked in a general sense for a year or two now. Note that there are still bugs and the experiences may be rougher than with an Intel or an AMD GPU, though.
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Info Center, Ark, and Okular are looking good 😎
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These Wayland improvements suggest that Linux is not the clean Unix type of operating system we were told exists. The several display managers are so unorganized that they need extremely careful customization for dinner desktop environments.
Simple desktop environments such as the old GNOME-2, XFCE, etc can work ok.
When the user has complex or demanding display requirements, X and Wayland fail. Nvidia, Intel and other hardware makers hardware trickery. Then the software including the operating systems and display managers fail to keep up with the users.
History repeats itself.
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