This week in KDE: Plasma 6 development continues

This Week in KDE 3 Minutes

Gonna be honest here: I’m on vacation right now, so this week’s blog post is going to be a bit lazy. I probably missed some things, so if you were expecting to see your work here and didn’t, then I’m sorry, and I’ll add it next week if you shoot me an email. Still, I did manage to notice some things, and you’ll find them here!

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 53

Our “Plasma 6” info page gained some useful information such as a “how to use/test it” section as well as some more narrowly-targeted lists of bugs that can be used to guide development. I’ve linked the “Plasma 6 bugs” list above, and will continue to do so in coming weeks.

KRunner’s auto-complete behavior has changed; now auto-completed text appears as a grayed-out placeholder and you have to hit the right arrow or tab key to accept it, as is common in other places where text can be auto-completed. For people who preferred the old autocomplete behavior, it’s kept as an option (Alexander Lohnau, link)

The Keyboard Indicator widget now visually shows the state of the Caps Lock and Num Lock keys both being pressed/active (Donald Menig, link)

When turning the volume level above 100% by using the “Raise maximum volume” setting, the volume icon now changes color to warn you of this (Fushan Wen, link 1 and link 2):

You can now find the “Updates” page in System Settings by searching for more keywords such as “offline” and “automatic” (Justin Zobel, link)

New Features

Kate now has an option to open new tabs immediately to the right of the current one (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 23.08. Link)

User Interface Improvements

Elisa now has a smarter algorithm for finding cover files (which turns out to be a surprisingly complex topic after you cover the simple and easy cases), ensuring that fewer of them get missed (Jack Hill, Elisa 23.08. Link)

Auto-hiding panels using a dark color scheme no longer sometimes exhibit a visual glitch when sliding in and out (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.7. Link)

When using a multi-channel audio setup that’s been configured to have different volume levels for the channels, adjusting the global volume level (e.g. using keyboard keys or a global shortcut) now adjusts the volume of each channel in a proportional rather than an absolute way (Quinten Kock, Plasma 5.27.7. Link)

Open/save dialogs now always show “Recent files” and “Recent folders” items in their sidebars (Méven Car, Frameworks 6.0. Link)

When merging the contents of two folders, the dialog that alerts you about this now makes it clear that the contents will be merged, rather than scaring you by talking about overwriting (Méven Car, Frameworks 6.0. Link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Gwenview no longer crashes when opening .nef formatted RAW image files (Kevin Backhouse, Gwenview 23.04.3. Link)

Fixed a major performance issue in the Plasma Wayland session that affected Intel GPUs and caused bad performance when animating widgets with the Background Contrast effect turned on (Xaver Hugl and David Edmundson, Plasma 5.27.7. Link)

The System Monitor app and widgets once again show stats for NVIDIA devices using the 535 series of the proprietary drivers. And it also should now be more robust against future changes in the way the proprietary NVIDIA driver formats its data (David Redondo, Plasma 5.27.7. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

…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, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now, but still in need of bugfixing and polishing to get it into a releaseable state by the end of the year.

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!

Published by Nate

Published

22 thoughts on “This week in KDE: Plasma 6 development continues”

  1. A few weeks ago, you announced that there will be some new standard settings in KDE/Plasma6. What would be the right place, if I would like to suggest some more? A bug report? Is there any way to mark them?

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    1. Bug reports are generally the best way, you can set the “severity” to “wishlist” to show that it’s a change/feature request.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. Always, yes! But please do read through the known issues list (linked in the blog post) to make sure you don’t report duplicates.

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  3. Ah, the ancient cover art in music players-nemesis rears its ugly head again.. On windows, you’d have to show hidden operating system files and then search for “albumart” or “albumartsmall” to find the damn things that were messing up everything. Not sure what cd-rip or metadata editing programs are responsible for creating hidden system files inside folders but there are gazillions of albums online containing that garbage. One learns the hard way.. It’s always good practice, on windows at least, to make a new folder for your newly downloaded album and move the files there to make sure all hidden files won’t tag along and your only other problem will be to figure out why your musicplayer has files named “RUNNING_WILD-mordor_BRANDED_AND_EXILED_by_******666METALSLAYERHEADBANGLORD_mortuarydefecatorsatanhellfiretormentor!!!!!!****** 🙂 Then again, thieves aren’t allowed to complain.

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  5. Just a question for later (enjoy the vacation!): what is happening with XWayland-Bridge? It was released and not worked on for 3 months, while issues start to pile up. The initial bug reports are ignored and so on.

    For example: earlier, when I had it on autostart, it started only in Wayland session, now it starts also on X11 session, causing to show some blurry area in the upper, left corner, so I have to manually close it from the dock (yes, it is showing on the dock, previously it was invisible). I would submit a bug, but when I see that my previous bug was ignored and that no one is working on the package, I see no point of doing it.

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    2. Yes, good bug reports can always be useful in the future, even if there aren’t development resources to action them right now.

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  6. > Open/save dialogs now always show “Recent files” and “Recent folders” items in their sidebars (Méven Car, Frameworks 6.0. Link)

    That’s not it, there were visible, you just couldn’t select them.

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    1. Oops, I was just going based on the title of the bug report that was marked as fixed, since it wasn’t an issue I had noticed or experienced myself. Can you describe in more detail what exact issue was being fixed so I can correct the blog post?

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    2. Why not to integrate Weston compositor for Wayland Plasma environment that is already provided of explicit sync maintaining Kwin just for xorg PLASMA environment?

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    3. TO Adjutant: why not to integrate Weston compositor for Wayland Plasma environment that is already provided of explicit sync maintaining Kwin just for xorg PLASMA environment?

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  8. “When merging the contents of two folders, the dialog that alerts you about this now makes it clear that the contents will be merged”

    Thank you! Little clarity fixes like this go a long way for regular people.

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  10. There is a problem i’d love to know whether Plasma 6 will fix/workaround that.

    If i use Dolphin and open a folder on the net drive and:
    1) Connection will disappear then everything will hang for some time or slow down considerably for a few minutes
    2) You close Dolphin but not the net drive directory in the Dolphin then close connection and open Dolphin again, everything lags the same way for a few minutes.

    Similar behavior with Kate
    1) If you opened some file on the net drive, the editing is slower than with local one. Why is that? Can’t you copy it in the background in some temp directory or even RAM and then only touch the network connection if the file is saved?
    2) If in the past you’ve opened file from net drive and then open Kate while the net drive isn’t connected the program takes more time to open. Does it check all files in the recent menu? If so why?

    I am not a fan of windows but they do this part right. If folder stops existing they don’t care everything else works the same way without slowing down. Same with recent files in text editors like Notepad++, it will open fast regardless of whether file that you opened in the past exist or not.

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  11. > Fixed a performance issue in Okular that could cause poor performance and memory pressure when zooming in (Max Müggler, Okular 24.08. Link)

    Sure hope this means 23.08 😉

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