This week in KDE: nicer digital signing in Okular

There’s some of interesting Plasma 6 news, but I’m saving it for another post in a day or two, so it doesn’t distract from all the great work that KDE contributors landed on other things this week! So let’s dig into that:

New Features

Okular’s digital signature workflow has been improved, and now offers you the opportunity to add various pieces of metadata such as “reason” and “location” to the signature, and also to optionally add a background image behind it (Sune Vuorela, Okular 23.08. Link):

User Interface Improvements

You can now double-click on a tab in Dolphin to create a duplicate of it (Méven Car, Dolphin 23.08. Link)

When Elisa switches album art between one image and another one, it’s now smoother and nicer-looking, with no visual flash or flicker (Fushan Wen, Elisa 23.08. Link)

Okular now shows the “Digitally Sign” action at the top level of its hamburger menu, for faster access (me: Nate Graham, Okular 23.08. Link):

All the dialogs in System Monitor have been ported to use a newer Kirigami dialog component, which looks better and fixes a few layout issues (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0. Link 1 and link 2):

Improved the responsiveness when hovering over items in Kickoff’s category list (Derek Christ, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Folder entries in System Settings’ File Search page now show their actual icons (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.0. Link)

After being notified of a filename conflict in the save dialog, keyboard focus now immediately returns to the filename field so you can change the name to something else (Oliver Beard, Frameworks 5.107. Link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

In the Plasma Wayland session, fixed a source of Powerdevil crashes when screens are sleeping (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)

Fixed a source of excessively high CPU usage in Plasma caused by moving windows around (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)

In the Plasma wayland session, fixed some cursor handling bugs that could cause cursors to look wrong in XWayland apps (Severin von Wnuck, Plasma 5.27.6. Link 1 and link 2)

System Settings’ “Login Screen (SDDM)” page now shows errors in the UI again (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)

Checking for updates in the PyCharm app no longer causes KWin to crash (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

• 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 59 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 55 last week). Current list of bugs
• 99 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 developer, please please please start living on Plasma 6 and fixing the bugs that you encounter. It’s long past the point where we should still be on Plasma 5! 6 is quite usable for daily driving (I’m doing so) and has lots of papercuts that need sorting out. A list of known issues that need fixing can be found at https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Plasma_6.

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!