This week SDDM–the venerable login manager used by KDE and some other DEs–finally got a new release after two and a half years! This work was pushed through by a variety of KDE contributors, notably Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Fabian Vogt, David Edmundson, and Harald Sitter. At this point they contribute the overwhelming majority of changes and have effectively taken over the SDDM project. Because of this, we’re going to bring SDDM closer and incubate it in KDE for Plasma 6! Once completed, this project will see SDDM release at the same time as Plasma and use Plasma technologies to add many new features, such as management of network and Bluetooth devices on the login screen, and tighter integration with user settings.
Plasma 6
In other Plasma 6 news, everything has been fully ported to use KSvg, the new SVG-handling library that can be used outside of Plasma as well. The technical work was almost entirely done by Marco Martin, with me helping out and performing QA.
Additionally, Xaver Hugl significantly improved graphics performance with multi-GPU systems that are using an NVIDIA GPU in the secondary position. Work is also in progress on a massive performance improvement for some Intel GPU users; more on that next week.
Finally, Qt scaling will be used on X11 in Plasma 6, improving the high DPI scaling experience for people not using mixed-DPI multi-monitor setups. That use case is already not supported on X11, so our story remains the same: if you have a mixed-DPI multi-monitor setup, use Wayland! Marco did this too.
There were many other random bugfixes as usual, with David Edmundson and Xaver Hugl fixing all of the significant bugs I was experiencing in my Plasma 6 Wayland session. As a result, I’m now using it as my daily driver, rather than that janky old X11 thing. 🙂 It’s amazing!
New Features
Welcome Center now has a “Live environment” mode that can be used by distros to show a special page in their live environments, including a nice friendly button to launch the installer (if the distro configures it appropriately; see the documentation here) (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.0. Link):
The Web Browser widget now shows its site’s favicon as its Panel icon by default, and you can also override this to set a custom icon if you prefer (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0. Link):
You can now open Partition Manager from the context menu of removable Devices in Dolphin and other apps using the standard Places Panel, so from there you can reformat it if you want (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 6.0. Link):
User Interface Improvements
Dolphin now hides apps’ temp files and backup files (i.e. the kind of useless files that end in ~ or #) unless actively showing hidden files (Méven Car, Dolphin 23.08. Link). This is a 23 year old feature request!
In System Monitor, text for list items without icons now visually aligns with the text for list items that do have icons (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.0. Link):
Other Significant Bugfixes
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
Distros using rpm-ostree for packaging (such as Fedora Kinoite) once again receive updates using Discover (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
System Settings’ Thunderbolt page no longer suffers from a layout glitch that hid text with large window sizes (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
KWin no longer sometimes crashes when you accidentally click on the tooltip for a window titlebar button, instead of the button itself that you were aiming for (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
When using a fractional scale factor, checkboxes on Discover’s Settings page no longer become glitchy and blurry when the page is scrolled with a touchpad (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 5.27.6. Link)
Fixed a few ways that KWin could crash immediately after logging in under certain circumstances (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27.7. Link 1 and link 2)
Notifications from Snap apps now show up more reliably, notably including Slack (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.27.7. 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 (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 73 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 very much usable for daily driving (I’m doing so) but still in need of work to get it into a releaseable state by the end of the year. Your help… really does help!
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 
Finally! Sddm 0.20.0! I was waiting for it, because rebooting hanged if you did not log out first.
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Yea. That was really painful.
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Every week is epiK ! What an amazing job from the community
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SDDM whoa. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any hint in changelogs regarding a proper fprintd integration to authenticate via password / finger at the same time.
There’s been a merge request for 150.000 years – I hope it’s included.
At least progress will now be much quicker. Thanks for all.
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Isn’t a bit weird that an action that is seldomly performed such as formatting or partitioning a disk is placed near actions that are probably more commonly used? I know that context menus are considered already hidden features but it still feels odd.
Perhaps plasma should prompt to format a disk if partition type is not recognized once the disk is plugged? I believe that will cover like 90% of the cases.
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Agree – it would be better to be above the ‘Hide’ option. Anyway – great work!
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As alway, very nice improvements! Offen quietly reading here, but from time to time i feels to give my Satisfaktion a voice. Thank you all out there working in KDE! ❤
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And I thought KDM was venerable and SSDM the latest in town…
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I thought why not rename SDDM to KDM, as original KDM is abandoned. And KDM name is better suited for the project. When I started installing KDE on Arch many years ago, I still remember a bit of confusion, I wanted to install KDM, thinking it belongs to the project, but Arch wiki suggested SDDM.
And by the way, I do not like much the “Display Manager” term. I think the term “Login Manager” is better, as it is meaningful.
So another idea is to rename SDDM to KLM (Kde Login Manager).
What do you think, Nate?
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+1 for KDM or KLM. Just be aware that there’s also an Dutch airline called KLM, who might have trademark claims.
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> Obviously we would need to talk with the prior maintainer Pier Luigi Fiorini about this.
That sounds new, nobody has ever bothered to inform me. Have fun.
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There’s not a lot to inform about, we haven’t done anything yet.
As stated in the very thing you’re quoting we did plan to before the that turns into anything concrete. Right now it’s an rfc in an issue tracker.
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In the 23.xx series, there is a very serious bug regarding I/O operations involving symbolic links in Dolphin and Konqueror and likely others that may cause data loss: when you copy/move a symbolic link, it copies or moves the target of the link, rather than the symbolic link itself.
It was reported as bug #464225 in January, but it hasn’t received any attention from any developers, and it’s importance is marked normal.
It caused data loss for me and at least another person, and by mentioning it here, I’m hoping to bring it to your attention: this should be a very high priority bug.
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Thanks for the heads up, that’s very serious.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=464225
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Oof, will take look.
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That’s reported also as https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=469134
I tracked down the origin.
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[quote]The Web Browser widget now shows its site’s favicon as its Panel icon by default, and you can also override this to set a custom icon if you prefer[/quote]
Great to read this – because if using favicons as Panel icons is part of the available features, it ought to be a rather short way to bring back Konqueror’s feature to do the same: Using the favicon of the currently active tab as the windows’ Panel icon (with the option to disable this for users who let aggregate all open windows of an application into a single icon).
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Bringing SDDM into KDE is the best idea. Thanks to KDE developers. IIRC back in the day, there was a KDE display manager, but that was discontinued in favor of SDDM. So SDDM can replace that in KDE ecosystem.
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“if you have a mixed-DPI multi-monitor setup, use Wayland!”
Yes, but only if you don’t need to restore the session of Plasma.
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“I’m now using it as my daily driver, rather than that janky old X11 thing.”
Hnnn. Seems you don’t need to use restore of Plasma session, what for many KDE/Plasma is crucial feature.
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Guys, thank you so much. SDDM 0.20.0 is super awesome. Wayland support is beast. THANK YOU VERYVERYVERYVERYMUCH. The wait definitely was not in vain ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
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Taking this opportunity, I would like to ask if there is a chance to backport fractional scaling support to Qt5 under Wayland as it is under X11
Qt6 supports fractional scaling on Wayland, but I think applications written in Qt5 will still dominate for a long time. It’s actually the only thing that keeps me using X11
Considering how many applications use Qt5, backporting fractional scaling support to Qt5 on Wayland would be a major improvement for the entire FOSS ecosystem
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I don’t think it’s going to happen, sorry.
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