This week in KDE: Panel Intellihide and Wayland Presentation Time

This Week in KDE 4 Minutes

It’s great to see lots of people running the Plasma 6 Alpha release, which has resulted in a spike of bug reports, as we had hoped and expected. So keep at it! Focus is already shifting to bug fixing now that most planned features are merged, with only a few to go. So far I’ve been following a policy of only noting fixes for bugs that affect shipping software, but I might have to change that given the loooong bugfixing window for Plasma 6. Still chewing on it.

Anyway, lots to talk about this week!

Plasma 6

(Includes all software to be released on the February 28th mega-release: Plasma 6, Frameworks 6, and apps from Gear 24.02)

General info – Open issues: 144

Plasma Panels have now gained a new visibility mode: “Dodge Windows” aka “intelligent auto-hide!” In essence, the Panel auto-hides when touched by a window, but is otherwise visible (Bharadwaj Raju and Niccolò Venerandi, link)

KWin now implements support for the Wayland “Presentation time” protocol! (Xaver Hugl, link)

Carl Schwan has been improving the look and feel of QtWidgets-based KDE apps left and right, and they just look gorgeous now! (Carl Schwan, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, and link 9):

List items throughout QML-based KDE software now use a nicer rounded highlight style (Arjen Hiemstra and Carl Schwan, link):

When you create a new blank panel, it now comes with an “Add Widgets…” button on it to save you some time, because let’s face it, the next thing you were about to do was add some widgets! (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

The Breeze icon theme has gained symbolic variants of the weather icons, which means that when you use a Weather Report widget on your panel, it’s no longer the only thing in or near the System tray with a colorful icon (Alois Spitzbart, link):

When you scroll down in one of the “Get new [thing]” dialogs to load new content, it now loads without throwing up a giant full-window loading indicator that blocks the view of what you were looking at (Rishi Kumar, link)

Ported all of Plasma’s widget configuration dialogs to use the same base components we use for system Settings pages, allowing for more unified code and also frameless, edge-to-edge scrollable views like in System Settings (Nicolas Fella, link)

the Task Manager widget’s rather confusing “Always arrange tasks in columns of as many rows” setting has been re-done in the UI to be comprehensible (Niccolò Venerandi, link):

Improved app launch time in the Plasma Wayland session (David Edmundson, link)

Elisa now always uses its internal music indexer rather than Baloo. This unifies the UX and indexing codepaths, as many users did not have Baloo available and were using the internal indexer anyway. The result is 10 open bug reports fixed! (Christoph Cullmann, link)

Konsole’s default “Breeze” terminal color scheme now uses the more attention-getting and attractive “Plasma Blue” color for intense text (Thiago Sueto, link):

In Dolphin, you can now toggle inline previews on and off with the F12 key, just like how you can in the open/save dialogs (Eric Armbruster, link)

Other Significant Bugfixes

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

Brightness control now works on FreeBSD systems (Gleb Popov, Plasma 5.27.10. Link)

Your preferred web browser is now looked up more reliably (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.27.10. Link)

Moving the pointer over a partially-visible list item in various Plasma widgets no longer auto-scrolls the view to make that list item totally visible, which could be rather disruptive in certain circumstances (e.g. for very large list items, or when moving the pointer up from the bottom of the list to try to reach an item at the top) and annoyed a lot of people (Bharadwaj Raju, Plasma 6.0. Link)

Dolphin’s ISO integration tools now work again after briefly breaking (Eric Armbruster, Dolphin 23.08.3. Link)

Other bug-related information of interest:

…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! Thanks to you we’ve hit the 70% mark, which is amazing! To be honest, I had thought the goal of 500 new KDE e.V. supporting members was too ambitious, but you folks have proven me wrong so far. But nonetheless, while 70% is amazing, 70% is not 100%, so if you like the work we’re doing, spreading the wealth by becoming a member is a great way to share the love. 🙂

If you’re a developer, work on Qt6/KF6/Plasma 6 issues! Which issues? These 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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20 thoughts on “This week in KDE: Panel Intellihide and Wayland Presentation Time”

    1. It’s a bit nebulous as it depends on the metrics of the active Plasma style. I suppose we could calculate that and show the value to the user, but it would change when you use a different Plasma style so maybe that would be weird?

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    1. “The main feature of this interface is accurate presentation timing feedback to ensure smooth video playback while maintaining audio/video synchronization”

      “[It] provides a way to track rendering timing for a surface. Client can request feedbacks associated with a surface, then compositor send events for the feedback with the time when the surface is presented on-screen.”

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  7. Wow, such great work! I am so stoked to hear about all this progress!

    Plus we get a 15 year old request fulfilled: “In Dolphin, you can now toggle inline previews on and off with the F12 key, just like how you can in the open/save dialogs”

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  8. Great improvements everywhere!! I’m really getting excited for Plasma 6!! 😀
    I love how QtWidgets apps look with the updated Breeze theme! (It also makes me quite happy that QtWidgets has no plans of being abandoned as I am working on a app using it :P). It’s sure that both QtWidgets and QtQuick both have their advantages and disadvantages, each have their own uses and can coexist together.
    The KNewStuff loading spinner change is welcome as the old behaviour was quite annoying.

    I wonder, does Qt{Widgets,Quick} and kwin support direct scanout for non-fullscreen applications? Such as this recent improvement done in GTK: https://blog.gtk.org/2023/11/15/introducing-graphics-offload/

    Thank you

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  9. Ehh… I like most of it, but I’m not feeling the rounded highlights on QML list items.

    In fact, I think the one time I experimented with writing something using Qt Quick 2, one of the many tweaks I made to keep it from feeling like a bad Android port included “and, if I’m overriding the highlight anyway to kill the unwanted slide animation and force the background and foreground color to match properly, I might as well un-round the corners too”.

    It’s not as bad as the “off by a pixel or two misalignments” Microsoft has been letting slip through in Windows 10 and 11 but it’s still giving me that “this is the visual side of why I don’t like rewrites like Kirigami and SwiftUI” gut reaction.

    More specifically, it feels OK in the Permissions column, where my QWidget intuition would see that as a QVBoxLayout and, thus, a bunch of widgets that don’t necessarily stretch the full width of the QScrollArea but, for the other two columns, it just doesn’t feel right what looks like it should be a QListWidget or QListView to have highlights that suggest dead space within their row.

    Maybe it’s because it reminds me of how necessary I felt it was to replace Clearlooks with Clearlooks Compact in my GTK apps in the days before the Lubuntu and then Breeze-GTK themes for GTK to remove excessive “because we like how it looks and we have bigger monitors than you” padding or maybe it’s because I’ve run into so many badly designed web apps where they assign the margins and padding to the wrong element and there’s a gap between the visible borders of clickable things and their active regions.

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