This week we weren’t done improving input device defaults; for Plasma 6, touchpad tap-to-click is now enabled by default! If you’re curious about the reasons, click that link.
In addition, convergence is starting to happen. You might notice that the number of open Plasma 6 issues is lower this week than it was last week! A good sign for sure.
Plasma 6
General info – Open issues: 85
In the Plasma Wayland session, text copied from an XWayland-using app now remains on the clipboard after it quits (David Edmundson, link)
In the Plasma Wayland session, dialog windows with parent windows set to live on multiple virtual desktop now always appear on the current virtual desktop (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
System Settings’ minimum window size is now smaller, fitting better into low-resolution 1366×768 screens with thick panels (me: Nate Graham, link)
System Settings’ Printers page has been rewritten in QML for better future maintainability and a more modern and consistent style (Mike Noe, Print Manager 23.12 with Plasma 6. Link):
Icons in Dolphin’s item view now look better and smoother when using a fractional scale factor (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 23.12 with Plasma 6. Link)
Other User Interface Improvements
In Dolphin, you can now middle-click a file to open it in the first app in the expanded “Open with” list, rather than the default app for its file type (Méven Car, Dolphin 23.12. Link)
.3mf files now display thumbnails showing their 3D model contents (Bernhard Sulzer, Dolphin 23.12. Link)
Other Significant Bugfixes
(This is a curated list of e.g. HI and VHI priority bugs, Wayland showstoppers, major regressions, etc.)
Yet again fixed the ability to monitor NVIDIA GPUs using System Monitor, this time improving compatibility with multi-GPU setups (Oliver Beard, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)
The time that you configure your system to dim the screen after is now respected, instead of the screen dimming in half that time (Konstantin Kharlamov, Plasma 6.0. Link)
Starting a Plasma Wayland session in VirtualBox is now more reliable (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)
Improved reliability with symlinked or hardlinked files on Samba shares opened with KIO-using KDE apps (Kevin Ottens, Frameworks 5.110. Link)
Other bug-related information of interest:
- 4 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 5 last week). Current list of bugs
- 57 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 59 last week). Current list of bugs
- 90 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs
Automation & Systematization
Koko now produces Flatpak bundles with every commit and Merge Request change via its CI system (Tobias Fella, 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 
Tap to click for the win! Yet another usage INSECT squashed that should have been obliterated ages ago. Better late than never.. Those things were infuriating, tap and nothing happens or you just opened a file when you didn’t want to and it didn’t even open in the middle of the screen. One more I recall is when you choose to log in without a password Google Chrome (probably others too) wanted you to enter one before you could use it. Something about some keyring yada yada. The solution was not a one click type of easy deal either. Foul words were spoken, things were thrown. I have actually erased/deleted distros just because of that one. Yep, I am that impatient, that petty and that ridiculous. I am also not the only one.
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How exactly did you set up your user account to log in with no password? We have a warning message for exactly this use case when you set up auto-login, but not when you simply have no password on the account. That’s because our user manager GUI doesn’t actually let you make your account passwordless. Did you use the command-line `passwd` utility do to that?
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If I recall correctly there was an option, a simple checkbox, while installing to log in automatically. Yes, I used a password but not for logging in only for sudo prompts and when Discover wants to install something important. And that whole thing messes up Chrome and others that are furious that I have logged in the session without entering any password. I had the same thing happen on Zorin OS with Chrome, and also with the flatpak version of Lollypop. Imagine that, enter your password to play your music..derpppp.. I am the only user and I really don’t want to type in any password or see any login screen ever to get to my desktop, the solution is not to remove the option while installing. The solution is to stop Chrome and others being jerks about it.
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Ok, that seems like a papercut. The installer should probably not let you set up a passwordless user. Just a bad idea. However that will be impossible to enforce since the distro controls the installer, not us.
So the distro will let the user set up something that we don’t support ourselves.
In the absence of the ability to control that, I guess we should try to do something on our side.
Still, the moral of the story is: set a password on your user account!
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@Nate
I DID set a user password, it’s mandatory while installing, but I also checked the box there that said “Log in automatically” and that’s when all Hell broke loose. I absolutely want to log in automatically every day of the week but apparently some apps disagree. There should be a warning about that since Google Chrome is kinda widely used..
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I have to say it publicly. There an employee/employees of Microsoft working ans sabbotaging KDE. First you cannot make KDE Wallet properly because let me quote KDE employees “it wouldn’t work for Windows”.
And today you removed AVIF support for the second time this year. Interestingley Microsoft and Apple proprietary HEVC has never been removed. You nver remove jpg, webp, but keep doing it with AVIF. Why?
Its libre software, but HEVC is proprietary from MS/APPL and you never ever remove it, but insisting over and over by removing AVIF.
The whole KDE is then broken:
1. No background/wallpaper on login screen (SDDM)
2. No wallpaper in KDE
3. No thumbnails in Dolphin
4. No background in Lock Screen
5. Gwenview can’t display photos
5. DigiKam broken
6. Showphoto (HDR, Panorama, …) editing software broken
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Sabotage? Are you quite sure? Can you please point me to where this was done? All of our code is open-source so it should be easy to find.
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Oh another thing while I’m on a nitpicking roll: Do we now have display settings in the right-click context menu on the desktop? There wasn’t before, on KDE Neon. If there is now, stop reading. Use case scenario: Connect older laptop with broken or no screen , lower resolution than 1080, to an external monitor via HDMI. Fire up a live usb to test or install KDE. Result: only wallpaper visible, no panel, with no means to ever get to click on the install icon or anything else for that matter. Pressing Meta key does nothing. Expected result: Right click on desktop and choose “Display Settings” where you can adjust resolution and pick default display. Linux Mint added this feature recently so that’s my go to live usb distro now whenever I need to do anything in a live environment. Removed busted-screen laptops make great media computers hooked up to a TV, just add a usb wifi dongle and a wireless keyboard with a touchpad and you’re the Lord Of The Sofa.
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Wouldn’t it be faster to right-click on the desktop and see for yourself than to write all of that out? 😉
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I will, when Plasma 6 is released on some good distro. Until then I’m on Windows.
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> System Settings’ Printers page has been rewritten in QML for better future maintainability and a more modern and consistent style
That’s nice. However, in general one does not have many printers in the list I guess — let it be a handful maybe — so the page looks rather empty. Probably the printer job’s list could be added below, so you have a quick access to both the most common features. What do you think? 🙂
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I actually had the same thought while looking at the screenshot!
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Do you plan to port more or all stuff for Plasma6 to those shiny looking FormCards? ❤ [1] [2]
They make the appearance very clear and organized.
[1] https://carlschwan.eu/1/01/01/kirigami-addons-0.11.0/#mobileform-is-now-formcard-0110
[2] https://invent.kde.org/libraries/kirigami-addons/-/issues/10
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Things are being incrementally ported, starting with our QML apps. After that, we’ll have to make the decision whether or not to adopt it for System Settings and Plasma’s config dialogs. I have a few reservations there especially for System Settings where the component’s currently quite low information density will work against it.
Another challenge is that there’s no QtWidgets equivalent (and little to no likelihood of one being created), so we would have so live with Qt Widgets’ config dialogs using an older style forever, or until they get ported to QML.
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YES!!! I’m very happy about tap-to-click enabled by default. Nice to see that a ton of people actually use tap-to-click as well, as shown by the link provided.
The reason this is so important to me is that the physical clicker on my touchpad doesn’t work. So if there’s a DE I can’t navigate with the keyboard to go to Settings to enable tap-to-click, it’s unusable without a mouse. Thankfully I could do just that in Plasma 5 — as long as the distro took me straight to the desktop (e.g. Ubuntu Studio 👍🏻) instead of giving me an intro screen to install the distro or try it out in a live environment (e.g. Kubuntu ❌). Every GNOME distro I’ve tried has this enabled by default, and I think it’s the same for Linux Mint Cinnamon. Couldn’t navigate and change touchpad settings by keyboard at all in Lubuntu (LXQt).
Can’t wait to daily-drive Plasma 6 on the next Ubuntu LTS with all the other fixes and optimizations coming along.
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Yay, my fix in the list in this week edition :3 Thank you!
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@Nate oh I just noticed, I see here you mention the powerdevil change as a 6.0 material, however in the commit a tag was added `FIXED-IN: 5.27.8`. So which version it is? 😊
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You’re welcome!
At the moment it’s 6 only as it wasn’t trivial to backport and I wanted to reduce risk If you’d like to try your hand at it and submit a merge request to do so, please feel free. And test on 5, of course. 🙂
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> At the moment it’s 6 only as it wasn’t trivial to backport and I wanted to reduce risk If you’d like to try your hand at it and submit a merge request to do so, please feel free. And test on 5, of course. 🙂
Ah, yeah, well, as a matter of fact I do have the commit backported to 5, because I’m using 5 series on Archlinux so that’s where I test-things. While working on the MR I had to port it back and forth, because I couldn’t compile 6.x version due to dependencies. So yeah, I do have the commit backport I can just send fro 5.x version.
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Nate, is the “ISOs mount like removable drives, but don’t remove the icon when unmounted” on the radar for Plasma 6? There’s a fair number of bugs about this, and apparently it was a tricky thing to do with some code in Places per a bug report I saw. Bit of a niche feature obviously, but this does feel like a papercut-type bug.
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Sounds like a Dolphin thing, not a Plasma thing. Do you have the bug report for it handy?
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https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428392 Here’s one.
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Is there a chance, that tap-to-klick will also be enabled for Trackpoints on Thinkpads?
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Hmm, does the physical hardware even support that?
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> tap-to-click by default
Thank you.
> In the Plasma Wayland session, text copied from an XWayland-using app now remains on the clipboard after it quits (David Edmundson, link)
Thank you!
> System Settings’ minimum window size is now smaller, fitting better into low-resolution 1366×768 screens with thick panels (me: Nate Graham, link)
Oh my god, as a 768p laptop and secondary monitor user, thank you.
> In Dolphin, you can now middle-click a file to open it in the first app in the expanded “Open with” list, rather than the default app for its file type (Méven Car, Dolphin 23.12. Link)
Huh, I suppose that would make it use your secondary option? Very cool regardless, this week’s update’s been a banger.
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