This week in KDE: re-organized System Settings

Automation & Systematization, This Week in KDE 3 Minutes

Plasma 6

General info – Open issues: 91

System Settings’ sidebar has gotten a much-needed re-organization! This is still under development and may change a bit before the final release, so don’t consider the following screenshots 100% final. Probably 90% final. But anyway, but here’s what we’ve got right now (me: Nate Graham, link):

Changed who handles screen arrangements in the Plasma Wayland session: until now, it was KScreen, whereas now for Plasma 6, KWin has absorbed that functionality. This will make it much easier to ensure a good UX here because state will be centralized in one location, rather than having it be synchronized across two components that need to be in communication with one another. This proved fragile throughout Plasma 5. The work has already fixed three bugs, with more to come. Ultimately this means that KScreen is now feature-frozen, and no further changes to multi-screen handling on X11 should be expected in Plasma 6 (Xaver Hugl, link)

While Discover is fetching updates, its progress bar now corresponds much closer to actual reality, instead of being more like a random number generator (Alessandro Astone, link 1 and link 2)

Discover now lets distros opt into turning on dependency auto-remove for apps that are removed with Discover (Alessandro Astone, link)

When the screen resolution or scale changes–which can happen when additional screens are plugged in–the wallpaper now instantly resizes to the new desktop geometry rather than doing an animated fade, which in this context just looked weird and glitchy and broken (Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2)

Improved the Breeze Night Color icon (Philip Murray, link):

Other New Features

Spectacle’s screen recording feature gained support for recording using the VP9 codec (CPU rendering only for now, but GPU acceleration is coming soon). In the process, the default location where screen recordings get saved to has been made customizable (Noah Davis, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Fixed a bug in Discover that could cause it to crash for some people after searching, or even when just launching the app (Harald Sitter, link 1 and link 2)

In the Plasma X11 session, various QtQuick-based dialog windows will no longer be missing their close buttons (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.27.9. Link)

Apps and Plasma can no longer crash when told to use DBus to launch an app with a malformed .desktop file name that’s out of compliance with the spec (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.111. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

Automation & Systematization

Added more GUI tests for the Battery & Brightness widget, the Clipboard widget’s barcode page, and the System Settings Users page’s avatar chooser sheet (Fushan Wen, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

…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

We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! If you like the work we’re doing, spreading the wealth is a great way to share the love. 🙂

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 bug-fixing and polishing to get it into a releasable state by February.

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!

Published by Nate

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25 thoughts on “This week in KDE: re-organized System Settings”

    1. Me neither!
      In fact, I’m very used to having themes right there at hand!

      But, then again… this is not finished so lets hope it gets changed again

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    2. I remember seeing this being discussed so I knew it was coming. I think the change was for new users on first boot (you know, the ones who double click things).

      I do question whether that is really what they look for. Maybe they do — they probably know better than me. But on first boot, I’ve never gone into the settings for Wi-Fi. I’ve always just used the widget in the systray.

      Along those thoughts, will the quick settings always be about click style? Because that’s not something that ever changes twice.

      It also seemed a little weird to have a category starting with ‘A’ to be buried in the middle.

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  2. > Spectacle’s screen recording feature gained support for hardware-accelerated recording using the VP9 codec. In the process, the default location where screen recordings get saved to has been made customizable (Noah Davis, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

    Actually, I only added support for software encoding with VP9. Support for hardware acceleration is in a separate MR because I don’t actually have a way to test it (my AMD GPU doesn’t support VP9). https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kpipewire/-/merge_requests/91

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    1. Oops, sorry, my bad. Changed the post to be more accurate. My hardware supports GPU-accelerated VP9 so I’ll try to test that MR soon.

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    1. This feature already exists: you just need to use the `kcmshell` command line program. The use case for it is rather niche so hopefully that’s good enough for now.

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  4. I know the division makes some kind of sense but I still think “input & output” and “connected devices” should really be one category.

    They’re all about connected devices, and the connected devices do input & output…….

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    2. Cameras and disks are both about storage, I guess. But yeah, Input & Output vs. Connected Devices is part of the 10% that’s still likely to change, based on discussions on KDE Invent.

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    4. It’s under consideration, yeah. The distinction between them can be a bit fuzzy. My concern is that I don’t want a mega category with like 12 things in it.

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  5. Maybe introducing the physical vs “logical”/remote concept for devices could help here: USB, PCI, hdmi etc devices could all belong to the physical ones, while Bluetooth and wireless devices would belong to the Remote one.

    Both categories would fit under Devices section, siblings of other system settings like network, lang/regional and so on.

    That way you also gain a natural centralized section where storing settings for devices which are not always connected (like Bluetooth devices, or, for laptop, devices that are at your workplace but not at home). etc).

    Pierangelo

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  6. Great to hear that System Settings’ sidebar is getting some attention. Sometimes I have to hunt around to find what I am looking for. I realize that it’s an art to get everything organized just so, but I’m sure you’ll find the balance.

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  7. It really feels like the momentum has kicked up an order of magnitude since Plasma 6 development got underway. Interested in an informed opinion on my suspicions from anyone involved in the development.

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  8. “re-organized System Settings”
    It looks like broken sorting of categories. Why “Appearance & Style” is moved so far down?
    In my humble opinion and from my experience these options are used quite often, for sure often than “Internet” and “Personal”, which I set up one time and working . For me these changes (reorganization) went in wrong way, because they making access difficult to most often used options.

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  9. Hello in your screenshot there seems to be an oversight in labelling the clicking behaviour where it says “selects them” “opens them”.

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  10. I love the new organization for the system settings. It puts things most people need working *right now* — and accessibility — front and center, so it’s the first thing people see.

    I think the order of the first four categories — Internet, Personal Settings, Input & Output, Connected Devices — make sense as shown in these screenshots.

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  11. While you’re updating the settings, can we also please get the search to return to the homepage once cleared and not to the previous settings pane?

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  12. If Kscreen is going away, I assume kscreen-doctor also won’t work anymore? Is there an alternative to configure displays via cli that will still work on plasma 6?

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  13. System Settings’ sidebar has gotten a much-needed re-organization!

    Nonsense. It did not need re-organization at all. It just makes it more difficult to find the things you want to change.

    If this is what the KDE developers have been doing in the last year then it is really time to stop using KDE.

    Please reorganize it back to how it was, that made sense, items were easy to find and were placed in the correct order of doing things, starting with the look and feel.

    As you can read I am deeply disappointed in the result and I am really thinking about quitting KDE completely. When Systemsettings has been ruined, what else have they done to complete this disaster?

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    1. Every time stuff moves around, it breaks the familiarity and muscle memory of people who got used to the old thing. That’s something we don’t do lightly; we have to decide that the new organization is so much better than the old one that it’s worth inconveniencing existing users. Clearly, we believed that here, or else we wouldn’t have done it.

      I’m sorry you’re dissatisfied with the new organization, but I’d encourage you to give it a chance and push through the frustration caused by things moving around. You might decide once you’ve gotten used to the new thing that you like it better than the old thing! That’s the hope.

      But if that doesn’t end up happening, and you still think that re-arranging the pages in System Settings for greater usability amounts to ruining KDE, you’re welcome to leave and find a community that better matches your preferences.

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