This week in KDE: Custom ordering for KRunner search results

Automation & Systematization, This Week in Plasma 3 Minutes

This was a big week for KRunner! In addition, the number of open Plasma 6 issues continues to tick down. Thanks to everyone who’s been making this happen!

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 81

You can now manually configure certain types of search results in KRunner to be high priority and hence always appear first in the results list! (Alexander Lohnau, link):

KRunner has also received a lot of performance work (Alexander Lohnau, link)

Landed some nice performance work for KWin as well, including making it do less unnecessary work by avoiding repainting layers of the screen that haven’t changed at all (Xaver Hugl, link)

Did a Plasma performance push too, resulting in various parts of Plasma and System Settings launching in some cases hundreds of milliseconds faster (Fushan Wen, link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)

The Breeze icon theme’s “refresh” icon and all other icons that use a similar “circle with arrows” style of iconography have now been updated with a new arrow style that looks nicer (Philip Murray, link):

The Breeze icon theme now has more colorful weather icons to match additional weather conditions supported by various weather providers (Alois Spitzbart, link)

When supported, KRunner and KRunner-powered searches now let you manually initiate “Hybrid Sleep”, which is when the system goes to sleep immediately and then hibernates in a few hours (Natalie Clarius, link):

The Display Configuration widget is now less intrusive on your System Tray, and only appears in the visible part if you’ve enabled Presentation Mode (Fushan Wen, link)

Improved the “your distro shipped Discover without its app backends” message to be shorter and more comprehensible (me: Nate Graham, link)

Explanatory text of placeholder messages found throughout Kirigami-based apps is now mouse-selectable and copyable, and can contain clickable links (me: Nate Graham, link)

User Interface Improvements

Preview thumbnails for HDR images being viewed in non-HDR mode apps are now converted to the sRGB color space, ensuring that they’re actually viewable (Mirco Miranda, kio-extras 23.12. Link)

Konsole’s multi-process architecture gained support for putting each process in its own Systemd cgroup when using (Systemd, of course), which makes them show up correctly as children of Konsole in System Monitor (Theodore Wang, Konsole 23.12. Link)

We now support public holidays in Benin (Lukas Sommer, KDE Frameworks 5.110. Link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Fixed yet another way that Plasma could crash when switching Global Themes (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

The Widget Explorer’s category filter once again works for people using the system in a language other than English after we broke this recently, sorry! (David Redondo, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Fixed one of the most common random generally unexplainable-to-the-user crashes in Plasma (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0. Link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the “Maximized” window placement mode no longer gets inappropriately applied to OSDs (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Added a bunch of autotests for Kirigami.PlaceholderMessage (Ivan Tkachenko, link)

Added a bunch of autotests for the Media Controller widget (Fushan Wen, 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!

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Published by Nate

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19 thoughts on “This week in KDE: Custom ordering for KRunner search results”

  1. What I would love to see in the Plasma 6 breeze theme, is progress bars and such becoming normal again. That is, a bar with percentage text inside it, rather than a thin two-coloured line with text next to it.

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  4. I believe the description of hybrid sleep (‘which is when the system goes to sleep immediately and then hibernates in a few hours’) is wrong. According to https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110510-00/?p=10703 and other sources, with hybrid sleep, the data is written *both* to RAM (like a sleep) and to disk (like a hibernation), and then the computer goes to *sleep*. It never goes into hibernation. But if the power (on a desktop computer) is cut, so that the information in RAM is lost, you can later, when the power is back again, wake up the computer *as if* it were in hibernation.

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    1. Raymond’s blog is obviously about Windows, not Linux, but I was just starting to respond to this too. The key functionality of hybrid sleep is suspend to disk followed by suspend to RAM, so that there’s a quick restore but in the event of power loss the user hasn’t lost their session. That’s the normal expectation users have. Anything else is very risky.

      systemd *does* have a systemd-suspend-then-hibernate.service option where the system suspends until the battery goes down to 5% or 2hrs if the system doesn’t have a battery, then wakes enough to hibernate. Presumably it’s for people who want instant-off and some attempt at a contingency if they get stuck in traffic. But Plasma shouldn’t be using defaults that are dangerous and will result in data loss if power is cut to a desktop machine without a UPS or if a laptop has a battery that drains before the machine can hibernate (or there’s an error).

      Perhaps Nate could clarify?

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    2. Having recently contributed to KDE’s power management service, I can confirm that there’s a distinction between “hybrid sleep” and “sleep, then hibernate”. They’re not the same thing. In the end it’s up to systemd what it will do with these commands, but the Arch wiki supports your statement.

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  6. Idea for Plasma 6: Has it been considered to rename plasma-pa to something like “plasma-audio” now that pulseaudio is being replaced by pipewire?

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    1. “plasma-pa” is an internal-developer-facing name not visible to users anywhere. So we could, but I think it’s pretty low priority.

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  8. kwin, plasma and krunner performance enhancements sound great! Are those noticeable in everyday use, is everything a little bit more fluent or does the battery hold longer on git master? Can’t wait for Plasma6! ❤

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    1. A few definitely are, such as the Wallpaper config window opening much faster if you have a lot of wallpapers.

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  9. It’s nice to see more and more progress each week!

    BTW I haven’t received Frameworks 5.109.0 on my Neon install 😦

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  11. “Plasma 6 is usable for daily driving now”
    Only if you are working with KDE/Plasma applications. BTW in current Neon Unstable “Display Configuration” is not working in Settings.
    Worse is that, when you will try to play with vlc, Synaptic, Opera you will see that isn’t so great (plasma crashes). Tested on on current Neon Unstable.

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