This week in KDE: Stomping all the bugs!

This week was a veritable fiesta of bugfixing, and we cut Plasma’s list of VHI priority bugs nearly in half! Lots of other apps got bug fixes, too. And finally, KDE’s volunteer contributors landed some great new features and UI improvements!

New Features

Skanpage now offers a “preview” feature in which you can select multiple specific parts of the image to scan, or automatically split the area into two pages, which can be useful when scanning books (someone going by the pseudonym “John Doe”, Skanpage 23.08. Link):

Elisa now supports controlling its Shuffle and Repeat settings via MPRIS, which means that you can now do so via the Media Player widget (Melissa Autumn, Elisa 23.08. Link)

User Interface Improvements

Removed a few less-important items from Gwenview’s Editing Tools sidebar (they’re still present in the menu structure) to make the window fit on a 1366×768 screen again (me: Nate Graham, Gwenview 23.08. Link)

Gwenview no longer appears in its own “Open the image in a different app” menu (Eugene Popov, Gwenview 23.08. Link)

Made various improvements to Gwenview’s Zoom UI: you can now click on any part of the zoom slider to jump to that zoom level, and the zoom combobox is now more keyboard-friendly (Eugene Popov, Gwenview 23.08. Link 1 and link 2)

Plasma Task Manager window previews now display the correct text for windows that don’t show the name of their app in the titlebar or have been customized by the user (me: Nate Graham and Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)

Refined the way that estimated battery life is calculated to improve its accuracy (Stefan Brüns, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)

Significant Bugfixes

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

Filelight no longer sometimes fails to launch when your disk is full, which was kind of bad since it’s a tool you can use to see what’s taking up all your space and clean it out (Harald Sitter, Filelight 23.04.1. Link)

In the Plasma X11 session, “Open containing folder” functionality in various apps is now Virtual Desktop- and Activity-aware, meaning you’ll no longer have the experience of an already-open instance of Dolphin in a different Virtual Desktop or Activity becoming focused and switched to. Wayland support will happen later as it requires deeper changes (Méven Car, Dolphin 23.04.1. Link)

Spectacle’s Rectangular Region selector now works properly when using a multi-monitor setup with at least one monitor having a scale factor below 100% (Noah Davis, Spectacle 23.04.1. Link)

Made various UI fixes to Skanpage, so now the “rotate image” buttons rotate the image in the expected directions, and the OCR language list view is scrollable if need be (me: Nate Graham, Skanpage 23.04.1. Link 1 and link 2)

You can no longer crash Dolphin by repeatedly entering and exiting Selection Mode quickly (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 23.08. Link)

In the Plasma Calendar’s “Months” views, months are no longer sometimes randomly and mysteriously missing their names (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)

Fixed several ways that Plasma could crash after getting into an inconsistent state when using certain types of multi-monitor setups (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.5. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a subtle UI glitch that could cause imported VPN configurations to not be saved to disk unless another setting was also changed at the same time… no longer! (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)

Mouse acceleration profiles now work properly when using Libinput 1.3 or later (Ilia Kats, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)

Fixed a variety of significant bugs found in System Settings’ Flatpak Permissions page: it no longer sometimes generates a broken overrides config; custom environment variable support has been fixed enough that we’ve re-enabled the feature; adding new filesystem paths no longer sometimes interferes with the state of other items in the list; and the “read-write” option of “All User Files” no longer sometimes disappears (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27.5. Link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)

Fixed a way that your screen arrangement priorities could end up getting scrambled under certain circumstances (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.5. Link)

Middle-clicking various things–including KWin-drawn titlebars–can no longer sometimes randomly crash the app that draws the thing you middle-clicked (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.106. Link)

Fixed an issue that could cause apps and Plasma to hang when using them to move a lot of files at once (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 5.106. Link)

Plasma no longer crashes when playing certain YouTube videos in a browser using Plasma Browser Integration, sometimes also when behind a proxy (Fushan Wen, Frameworks 5.106. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 6 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 11 last week). Current list of bugs
• 47 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 50 last week). Current list of bugs
• 136 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

…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!