This week in KDE: All about the apps

This week some of your favorite KDE apps got lots of positive changes! Dolphin, Kate, Okular, Elisa, Partition Manager, and Filelight all received some nice improvements.

In the background, Plasma 6 porting work continues. I’ve now got a working Plasma 6 dev session on my machine. It’s still rough, but it’s usable. Now I can see why more experienced contributors predicted the need to skip a release and give the initial Plasma 6 release at least an 8 month dev cycle, not a 4-month one. But fear not; it’s happening!

New Features

When Dolphin is in split view mode, there are now context menu items and keyboard shortcuts to let you quickly move or copy items to the opposite view (Méven Car, Dolphin 23.08. Link)

Links in files open in Kate are now clickable! (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 23.08. Link)

Note that for now this requires you to manually enable to “Open link” plugin, which is shipped by default but left disabled

User Interface Improvements

Partition Manager now finally has its own icon, instead of re-using Filelight’s icon (Gerson Alvarado, Partition Manager 23.08 and Frameworks 5.106. Link):

Filelight’s default window size is no longer too large to fully fit on a 1366×768 screen (me: Nate Graham, Filelight 23.04. Link)

Dolphin once again tries to tell you what to do instead of running it with sudo (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 23.04. Link):

Improved the RTL layout and focus indicator lines in various types of Breeze-themed buttons, checkboxes, and radio buttons (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27.4. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Scrolling on the Task Manager and Pager widgets now works more reliably when you sometimes scroll using a touchpad and sometimes using a mouse wheel (Prajna Sariputra, Plasma 5.27.5 Link 1 and link 2)

You can now press-and-hold with a touchscreen to open a context menu for System Tray icons (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)

Scrolling over the Audio Volume, Media Player, and Battery & Brightness widgets now always raises or lowers the volume and brightness based on the direction of the scroll rather than respecting the natural/inverted scroll direction setting (Vlad Zahorodnii and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Streamlined the appearance of the “cool Plasma features” pages in Welcome Center (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.0. Link):

When showing the logout screen by pressing the power button or Ctrl+Alt+Del, it now defaults to pre-selecting the “Shut down” action by default, rather than “Log out” (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Significant Bugfixes

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

Fixed a way that Okular could crash when you try to save changes made after filling out forms in a document (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 23.04. Link)

When using Elisa in a language other than English, cover overlay “Play” and “Add to Playlist” buttons now immediately work on startup (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 23.04. Link)

Fixed a complex multi-monitor bug involving misbehavior with KVM/headless setups that can sometimes prompt people to work around the issue by purchasing and using a bi-directional EDID emulator gizmo (Kai Li, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)

Fixed a recent regression in the size and sharpness of GTK CSD windows’ minimize, maximize, and close buttons when not using any scaling (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)

System Monitor sensors that use the “watt-hour” unit now display the unit correctly (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.27.5. Link 1 and link 2)

On Info Center’s Networks page, the Refresh button now actually works (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)

Dragging from empty areas of the toolbar in Discover and many other Kirigami-based apps now always works, rather than only working on some pages/views and not others (Marco Martin, Kirigami 5.106. Link)

And last but not least… fixed a major source of the infamous Dolphin bug where folders don’t update in real-time when contents are modified in another app (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.106. 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 48 last week). Current list of bugs
• 99 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Automation & Systematization

Added an autotest to test the various different ways that items can be opened in Dolphin (Felix Ernst, Link)

When you try to change translated text in a KDE git repo, a git hookscript now stops you, because translations are handed elsewhere and merged into the git repos via an automated process (Ben Cooksley, Link)

Changes not in KDE that affect KDE

Logging out of a Wayland session (not shutting down or rebooting, just logging out) now works as expected (Fabian Vogt, SDDM 0.20. 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!