The bug-fixing marathon continued this week, alongside an avalanche of new bug reports! It appears people are indeed testing the Plasma 6 beta release, which is great! Fortunately most of the bugs being reported are minor. Keep it up, everyone! And don’t forget about the Plasma 6 fundraiser; we’re getting really close!
KDE 6 Mega-Release
(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: 205
New features
When using automatic bug reporting, the system notification telling you that a crash report has been automatically reported now also gives you the opportunity to send along a message to tell developers what you were doing or help them understand the context surrounding the crash (Harald Sitter, link)
Bug fixes
Important note: I don’t mention fixes for bugs that were never released to users; it’s just too much for me (it would probably be too much for you to read as well), and most people never saw those bugs in the first place. Because we’re in the middle of a big Plasma dev cycle, there are a lot of these bugs! So big thanks to everyone who’s made it a priority to fix them!
Fixed a case where Dolphin could crash when undoing a mass-rename job (Akseli Lahtinen, link)
Partition Manager no longer lets you set sector alignment to zero (Andrius Štikonas, link)
Switching your language to European Portuguese now works properly (Harald Sitter, link)
System Settings’ Recent Files page now supports non-default settings highlighting (Méven Car, link)
System Settings Energy Saving page now also supports non-default settings highlighting (Jakob Petsovits, link)
On System Settings’ Screen Edges page, the “Remain active when windows are fullscreen” checkbox now correctly highlights when in a non-default state (me: Nate Graham, link)
Scrolling on sliders throughout Plasma now scrolls in the expected direction when using inverted/”natural” scrolling (Ismael Asensio, link)
When taking a screenshot in Spectacle with the “automatically copy to clipboard” setting, the system notification that tells you about this can now be successfully be clicked to open the image in the default image viewer (Noah Davis, link)
The “Add More Timezones” Digital Clock widget popup is no longer sometimes too narrow to read the available timezones (me: Nate Graham, link)
Fixed several window positioning issues when using the “Minimize Overlapping” placement mode with a fractional scale factor in the Plasma Wayland Session (Yifan Zhu, link)
Other bug information of note:
- 5 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 41 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 176 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs
Performance & Technical
Added support for “DMA-Fence deadlines”, which should improve performance and responsiveness on systems with Intel integrated GPUs in the Plasma Wayland session (Xaver Hugl, link)
Did a lot of performance work for the KWin Overview effect; it’s now much smoother, and work is ongoing to make it open faster, too (Vlad Zahorodnii and Marco Martin, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7)
The Night Color transition no longer wrecks performance when using certain AMD GPUs (Xaver Hugl, link)
Ported the Accounts page in System Settings to work with Qt 6 (Nicolas Fella, link)
Automation & Systematization
Added a test to ensure that the animation speed setting works as expected (Fushan Wen, link)
Added a test to ensure that extracting the accent color from the wallpaper works as expected (Fushan Wen, link)
Added a test to ensure that the Media Controller widget’s time slider works as expected (Fushan Wen, link)
Added a GUI test to ensure that Info Center’s “About This System” page shows data properly (Alexander Wilms, 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
We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! Thanks to you we’re now at 88% of our goal of 500 new KDE e.V. supporting members! That’s really close to 90%, which is close to 95%, which is close to 100%! So I think we might actually make it… 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! Which issues? These issues. Plasma 6 is very 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!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Huh, I don’t really remember, but I think DMA Fence was the issue with intel iGPU that was talked about in Brodie’s video, right?
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Are the automatic crash reports genuinely useful? I’ve been testing out Plasma 6, and have manually reported a couple minor things, but I’ve sent several of the automatic reports in hopes that they are so.
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They are in fact quite useful.
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It would be nice to make it hard to set the default browser without changing the default browser while updating the application, for example, the default is chrome, a Firefox update comes and suddenly it becomes the default instead of chrome
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Does Firefox do that?
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Is it possible to add easy installation of nvidia drivers to Plasma as it is done in Ubuntu or Mint?
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Not as easily. The distro knows what its NVIDIA drivers are names and packages as; KDE doesn’t. There are possible ways to adapt to this, but no one’s done it yet.
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OK, thanks 🙂
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Soon, Firefox 121 will get the default Wayland version, but it can have issues with PiP (Picture in Picture) mode, which I use all the time. This supposes to be solved on a window manager level.
Do you know anything about that? Does it work correctly in Plasma? I guess I will find out pretty soon and in case of issues, I’ll let you know.
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To work properly out of the box, it needs a new Wayland protocol which is currently being bikeshedded to death, plus adoption by both KWin and Firefox. Until that happens, you can trivially fix it yourself by right-clicking on the PIP window and choosing More Actions > Keep Above Others.
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This is a bad workaround, because you need to do it for every video, and it quickly becomes too tedious.
My current solution was to create a Kwin rule to keep the window above others. The problem is, it does it with the whole app. Luckily, I installed YT as a progressive webapp (based on Firefox, a separate session, user, etc.), hence the rule is applied only to YT window. So basically, when I launch YT, I need to manually minimize it to get to other windows. This is less than ideal. Still, this works like this:
– open YT app
– open PiP
– minimize YT main window
– PiP stays above, so I can then open/raise/maximize other windows/apps.
Anyway, thanks for the info. Since FF posted this issue as a known bug, this probably will be fixed if they add the missing protocol.
I wonder, how many of such small protocols are still not there? A dozen, a hundred, couple hundreds, above thousand?
Your list of showstoppers is painfully incomplete. Probably, more and more missing features will be coming out with time. That is why Wayland devs should make a board with a list to do….
If Wayland devs had KDE devs attitude, this would be long done. Unfortunately, they behave like typical Gnome devs. They probably expect app devs to work around and discuss whether this is even necessary, which is insane. Windows or Apple could do it, but even they would face massive protests and would be flooded with feature asks, to make the platform… useful. Or maybe, this whole thing is just too overwhelming for Wayland devs and there are too little of them? Anyway, the situation is not looking good on that side so far. Hopefully the pressure will knock some senses to them or the community will gather and dev group will grow? We’ll see. However, there is no turning back and sooner or later Wayland will become feature complete, because there is no other way.
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