This week in KDE: power management galore

Automation & Systematization, This Week in KDE 3 Minutes

This was a big week for backend work, especially on the subject of power management and energy efficiency!

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 81

New Features

Welcome Center’s first page can now be customized by distros–or for that matter, by users (me: Nate Graham, link)

User Interface Improvements

The KDE desktop portal implementation now supports the new cross-desktop accent color standard (Fushan Wen, Plasma 5.27.8 Link)

The separator line between the titlebar/toolbar area in KDE apps and the content below it is now drawn at the correct stroke weight with a high DPI screen (Carl Schwan, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

KRunner-powered searches now only show you sleep modes that are actually supported by the system, and you can also now find them by searching for the word “power” (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.0. Link 1 and link 2)

After the work done last week to improve cursor responsiveness and lower power usage in the Plasma wayland session… we did some more! (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0. Link)

The notifications about low and critically low battery power are now worded in a shorter and clearer way (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0. Link)

The Lock/Logout widget no longer changes in height when configured to only show one item (Yannick, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Improved the keyboard navigation and accessibility properties of Discover’s Reviews viewer and entry page (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Fixed a glitch in Dolphin that could cause the view to not display the correct files after clearing the text entered in the search field (Amol Godbole, Dolphin 24.02. Link)

When run in a VM, Plasma now disables auto-suspend as this can sometimes cause the VM to hang (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

Hybrid Sleep now actually works (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

System Settings’ Accessibility page no longer erroneously asks you to save your changes when you leave it without having actually made any changes (Jürgen Dev, Plasma 5.27.8. Link)

The Baloo file indexing service no longer re-indexes everything after every reboot when using the Btrfs filesystem (Tomáš Trnka, Frameworks 6.0. Link)

The file dialog is once again capable of saving to files with quotes in their names (Andreas Bontozoglou, Frameworks 6.0. Link)

In various QtWidgets-based apps, star ratings are no longer inaccurate when using icon themes that lack the rating-unrated icon (Felix Ernst, Frameworks 6.0. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Improved some autotests in Plasma and KPipeWire (Fushan Wen and David Edmundson, link 1 and link 2)

…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

19 thoughts on “This week in KDE: power management galore”

  1. One problem that has yet to be fixed involving system settings. Even after selecting numlock on when logging into KDE it fails to turn on numlock on every system I’ve had for years. Currently it’s failing to turn the numlock on for my System 76 Pangolin laptop. Would someone please look into this?

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    1. That is strange because I’ve never had that issue. Is it possible the bios is over-writing the setting on reboot?

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    2. This setting worked fine on a desktop I had years ago, but once I moved to a laptop and especially since I bought this System 76 laptop the numlock has never worked on login. All the System 76 drivers are properly loaded. This has happened on KDE Neon, Manjaro, and other distributions with KDE in it. I’ve had HP, Dell, and now this System 76 laptops with and without numeric keypads. Those that had numeric keypads have never listened to the KDE system settings when setting the toggle for numlock on. I find it odd myself. Alas, System 76 doesn’t do KDE. I’ve not had this issue when running any other DE other than KDE.

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    3. Hey mate,

      So I happened to be compiling, testing, and playing with plasma-desktop this week (version 5, no 6 _yet_) over on OpenBSD-current in the recent ports. (Shout-out to Rafael Sadowski for their ongoing port!) And apparently there are a number of ways to have numlock on at login.

      First is a BIOS/EFI/U-BOOT/SEL4 or what have you name for the firmware/bootloader-shim, may have an option to toggle. Typically hiting F1 at boot, but look up your vendor´s and specific model´s variation. Assuming that isn´t available, you can do that through config files in SDDM or whatever Display Manager (DM) you have.

      Taking this from Arch wiki:

      Link = https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SDDM

      2.5 Numlock
      If you want to enforce Numlock to be enabled, set Numlock=on in the [General] section.

      And

      2.12 Running under Wayland
      SDDM can run rootless under Wayland, since sddm 0.20.0.
      Create a new config file in the /etc/sddm.conf.d/ directory, name it something like /etc/sddm.conf.d/10-wayland.conf.

      Add the following to the new file:

      /etc/sddm.conf.d/10-wayland.conf
      [General]
      DisplayServer=wayland

      Directions:

      You look for any config file under the /etc/sddm.conf.d/ directory and edit one of them or make a file like /etc/sddm.conf.d/10-wayland.conf

      Explicitly, in Konsole or other terminal:

      sudo -i nano /etc/sddm.conf.d/10-wayland.conf

      Where ¨sudo -i” is asking for root permission with more security using the “-i” option. (This is the same as running the command after ¨su – root¨) It stops your user environment variables from being run as root, a rather easy and common exploit (or part of a chain of exploits).

      Where ¨nano” is a text editor. You could replace this with vim, vi, or some graphical editor like Kate. Though graphical editors need some helpers that may not be installed on your system to even do higher permission editing like this, so you might find it easier in a terminal prompt like Konsole or similar.

      Then add to the file ¨/etc/sddm.conf.d/10-wayland.conf¨ the two lines:

      [General]
      Numlock=on

      Note: There should only be one [General] in this file. So just add Numlock=on under the existing [General] if it is already listed. You can also add DisplayServer=wayland as a third line if that interests you or not. As of version 0.20, SDDM uses Weston by default as the wayland compsitor. Avoid this option if you have one of those broken nvidia gpus and their questionable Linux Wayland support. (Thank you Linus for being a great finger and role model, as always!)

      Save it with CTRL+S and exit with CTRL+X

      Finally, reboot to test if it works as it should.

      If you´d prefer graphical options, you can configure your plasma keyboard settings to auto enable number lock, however this would only affect applications post-login (as far as I know), which may or may not be your desired use case.

      [strikethrough]Maybe a graphical (GUI) option could be added to the Startup/SDDM tab in Plasma Settings @Nate -senpai? Or I and others just oblivious and not finding it?[/strikethrough]

      Oh wow. So looking this up a smidge´ more:

      Link = https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Activating_numlock_on_bootup

      2.3 KDE Plasma
      Go to System Settings > Input Devices > Keyboard, in the Hardware tab, in the NumLock on Plasma Startup section, choose the desired NumLock behavior.

      Yours truly,

      Random, Totally-a-Biped Sentient

      TLDR (To Long Didn´t Read): There is an easy graphical setting at the end here. Presumably, I and others are oblivious and lacking in their search-fu. Unless this Plasma setting doesn´t effect SDDM as well? Can someone verify for us? @Nate -senpai?

      PostpostScript: There are also kernel config options in the last link if you want a go at that as well.

      Liked by 2 people

    4. Thanks to Random, Totally-a-Biped Sentient for pointing me to the Arch Wiki. Section 2.7 on Activating numlock on bootup resolved my issue with a simple edit of the sddm.conf file fixed my numlock issue with my System 76 laptop. Thank you very much. I now have the desired effect when entering KDE.

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  2. Is there a way to test out the Plasma 6 Wayland session using KDE Neon’s Unstable and Dev ISOs? I’ve tried it on 2 of my laptops and they seem to default Xorg. I tried logging out, but it just automatically logs back in to Xorg. I thought that Wayland was supposed to be the default session for Plasma 6?

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  3. Try to verify how the audio desktop environment behaves when all audio jacks are used by different devices such as a 5.1 audio system, webcam’s microphone back port, and front panel audio by headphone and microphone…. because the audio manager tends to be a bit confused (sometimes it doesn’t recognize both line out and headphone properly, moreover headphone appears to be set on duplex in order to make the microphone plugged in the specific jack visible and audio microphone could be not detected properly by the programs involved such as telegram. this happen for example when the resources is no longer detected forcing to uninstall the jack of the microphone and plugging it again. This is the only working solution every time each audio resources is no longer visible properly for any reason).

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    1. Because we support PulseAudio as well as PipeWire, that’s a distro decision, so the answer is “whenever your distro decides to make PipeWire the default audio manager.”

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  5. You started out by saying it was a “big week for […] energy efficiency!” but didn’t tell what actually changed. Could you maybe make a follow up post on that @Nate?

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  6. Just upgraded my Neon installation from user to unstable (apt-get yolo, baby) – WOW what a night and day difference the Wayland session is.

    FANTASTIC job Nate and everyone else, this is looking amazing already.

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  7. Looking forward to Plasma 6! Will kio-admin for Dolphin be ready and enabled by default in Plasma 6? I wonder why KDE doesn’t implement something like an optional UAC ? Sounds disturbing, but UAC works amazing!

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    2. In KDE neon, I’ve noticed that the right-click context menu in Dolphin that says “Open as Administrator” asks me for my password and opens up a new Dolphin window, which doesn’t really show it, but I can now create and modify root files. It would probably be nicer if Dolphin had a banner or something that indicated I have administrator privileges now. That’s not working for you?

      On the other hand, what I use kio-admin is to open up a root-owned file in Kate, then when I go to save it, I’m prompted for my password and it’s saved.

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  9. Something in the latest Kio 110 stuff is causing crashes when I try to overwrite text files, images files, etc. when it’s in Dolphin that crashes when it’s on the desktop the Plasmashell crashes. Good thing I had btrfs and Snapper setup so I could go back to Kio 109.

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  10. @ngraham:

    > The Baloo file indexing service no longer re-indexes everything after every reboot when using the Btrfs filesystem (Tomáš Trnka, Frameworks 6.0. Link)

    You forgot to mention this renders the existing DB contents as invalid, and the DB *must* be purged afterwards. This causes actual malfunction for anyone switching to a newer KF5/KF6 version.

    Please include an appropriate warning message in the next TWIK.

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