This week was a bit on the slow side as people are on vacation and preparing for Akademy 2023, which begins next week! Nevertheless progress on Plasma 6 continued, with a notable uptick in open bug reports as a result of more people testing it out, which is good! If you haven’t tried it yet, please do! Progress was also made on fixing existing known issues too.
Plasma 6
General info – Open issues: 63
The Breeze cursor theme has received a visual overhaul to make it nicer looking and more consistent with how Breeze style evolved over the course of Plasma 5! (Manuel Jesús de la Fuente, link):
When not using the “Include Desktop” feature, Alt+Tab Task Switchers no longer appear when invoked but there are no windows open, or only one window is open (Daniel Lipovetsky, link)
The keyboard shortcut used to trigger the Mouse Mark effect can now be customized (Andrew Shark, link)
User Interface Improvements
Created a new Kirigami component to display banners at the top of app windows and views. We were previously using the Kirigami.InlineMessage component for this, but it was complicated to implement in a way that looked acceptable in that spot, and even then it never looked quite right. The new frameless banner component looks much better! Expect to see it show up in Kirigami-based apps over the coming months and years. (Carl Schwan, link):
Significant Bugfixes
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
Fixed a performance issue in Okular that could cause poor performance and memory pressure when zooming in (Max Müggler, Okular 23.08. Link)
Fixed an issue that could cause severe screen distortion in the Plasma Wayland session when using certain multi-GPU graphics setups (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.27.7. Link)
Fixed an issue that could cause all connected screens to be marked as “primary” under certain circumstances (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 5.27.7. Link)
Fixed a way that KWin could crash in the Plasma Wayland session after using the clipboard under certain circumstances (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0. Link)
Fixed a major recent regression that had the effect of causing the target of a symlink to be moved or copied instead of the link itself (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 5.108. Link)
Editing files using kio-admin no longer unexpectedly changes their permissions (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 5.108. Link)
Fixed a way that Plasma could sometimes crash when closing all running apps by middle-clicking on their Task manager icons (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 5.108. Link)
Other bug-related information of interest:
- 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 61 15-minute Plasma bugs (1 more than last week). Current list of bugs
- 73 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs
Web Presence
Released another “KDE for” page, this time for frequent travelers (Carl Schwan and the KDE Promo team):
Automation & Systematization
Added a unit test for parsing NVIDIA GPU driver stats, so that we can catch regressions caused by the NVIDIA driver itself earlier (David Redondo, 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 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!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
I am using latest KDE Plasma (5.27.6) in Arch Linux on a touch screen laptop. After some recent updates, when I snap a window very quickly using touch (by quickly, I mean, if I release it before the snapping animation finishing), the plasma shell restarts. I also found the same bug in Kubuntu 23.04. The bug only occurs in Wayland. Is this a known bug?
LikeLike
Sounds like kwin or plasmashell are crashing. Check coredumpctl with this guide and if it has symbols present you can report it at bugs.kde.org: https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Debugging/How_to_create_useful_crash_reports#Retrieving_a_backtrace_using_coredumpctl
LikeLike
In general https://bugs.kde.org is the right place to report this kind of thing, not in the comments section of random blog posts. 🙂 Justin’s suggestion is a good one.
LikeLike
“The keyboard shortcut used to trigger the Mouse Mark effect can now be customized”
That’s a 9 year old bug fixed right there, excellent!
LikeLiked by 1 person
More of that, it also fixes the arrow drawing, that is available with Ctrl+Meta+Shift. And removing previous draw works right at first shortcut hit (Meta+Shift+F12).
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Dolphin not showing metadata for files on network shares, “Details” tab in File Properties missing”
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=452924
It’s a pity that some bugs are simply not fixed. Tags just does not seem to interest the mass of users.
LikeLike
Dolphin is a 100% volunteer project. As such, I think this is one of those “be the change you want to see in the world” situations. If you can’t because you lack the technical skills, well, that’s probably a good indication of why it hasn’t been solved yet: it’s a hard problem and requires expertise to fix.
LikeLike
“Probably relevant but far from done:” https://invent.kde.org/system/dolphin/-/merge_requests/522
LikeLike
> The Breeze cursor theme has received a visual overhaul
I see some interesting cursors there, that I cannot remember I seen before.
Where are such cursors used as wayland-cursor and x-cursor?
LikeLike
Not sure, to be honest.
LikeLike
Would be convenient to integrate Weston compositor based on explicit sync in Wayland Plasma environment, so to simplify the transition to vulkan API stack? Kwin would run in Xorg Plasma environment matching Opengl. So to divide Kwin, Xorg and Opengl based on implicit sync from Wayland Weston and Vulkan based on Explicit sync. Would be not more simple to separate an hypothetical legacy KDe Plasma operating system addressed for legacy hardware from a modern KDe Plasma desktop operating system addressed to modern hardware?
LikeLike
Hey Nate, wish you all the best for the Akademy and a good journey!
I’d appreciate so much if you talked with your colleges about enhancing the tiling feature future at the event. Marco has done an amazing job, but the current implementation is so basic that it feels more like a POC and as such I found myself not really using it despite liking to integrate it into my workflow. Therefore I really hope it can later really be called a first class citizen in Plasma 6. [1] 🙂
[1] https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/issues/10
LikeLike
I agree that it’s quite rudimentary. Ultimately I think it will be improved by people who can contribute patches.
LikeLike
Thanks for sharing info about KDE.
I recently change to linux and KDE is my favourite DE.
Keep up!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Aún me quedo con los cursores de Oxygen
LikeLike