This week in KDE: un-flashy important stability work

Automation & Systematization, This Week in KDE 4 Minutes

Everyone kept hammering on the bugs this week. As a result, the number of open Plasma 6 issues decreased, and so did the number of older high and very high priority Plasma issues! I’m feeling really good about this release. Daily driving it is already a pleasure. I think it might be a winner. 🙂

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: 199

UI improvements

The “Advanced Power Settings” page in System settings has now been folded up into a sub-page of the “Energy Settings” page (Jakob Petsovits, link):

Made a variety of improvements to the way device batteries are shown on Info Center’s “Energy” page: more device types are now identified correctly, and their device models are now shown so you can more easily distinguish batteries from different devices of the same type (Shubham Arora, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4)

When you try to connect to a Wi-Fi network but enter the wrong password, you’re now informed of this immediately instead of having to wait a while to learn why it didn’t connect successfully (David Redondo, link)

The Breeze-themed Telegram icon has been updated to better match Telegram’s own branding (Onur Ankut, link):

The Breeze cursor theme now includes more pre-generated sizes, making its cursors look better at various scale factors and in more apps and toolkits that don’t yet conform to the cursor-shape-v1 Wayland protocol (Jin Liu, link)

Ark’s integrated viewer window now remembers its window size the next time you open it (Ilya Pominov, link)

In Spectacle’s Rectangular Region mode, you can now hold down the Shift key to see the magnifier while moving the box using arrow keys (Noah Davis, 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 encountered them 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!

KWin can no longer crash when told by an app to open window with an invalid size (Xaver Hugl, link)

Editing an app’s .desktop file in such a manner that the file’s Exec= value ends up containing an equals sign no longer causes the properties dialog to crash the next time you use it to edit the same file (Harald Sitter, link)

Fixed a common random Plasma crash (David Redondo, link)

You can no longer crash KMenuEdit by creating a new entry, immediately deleting it, and then clicking “Save” (Harald Sitter, link)

In the Plasma Wayland session, the power and session actions once again work after KWin has crashed (David Edmundson, link)

Fixed several visual glitches related to missing pixels when using multiple screens with any of them having a fractional scale factor (Yifan Zhu, link 1 and link 2)

When using Dolphin’s Details mode to view a folder tree, expanding a folder no longer orders the items incorrectly when the parent view was sorted by size (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Changes to the cursor size now take effect in Plasma immediately, without needing to restart plasmashell (Vlad Zahorodnii and others, link)

Using the “Cut” command on files and folders in Dolphin once again causes them to become visually desaturated (Jin Liu, link)

GTK4 apps now use the current KWin-provided window closing animation, instead of just disappearing immediately (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

When using Elisa in mobile mode, its playlist sidebar can once again be closed (Kevin Kofler, link)

The Plasma-themed spinbox UI element now works properly with a wider variety of 3rd-party styling–hopefully all of them! (Marco Martin, link)

Other bug information of note:

Performance & Technical

The Overview effect is now much faster to launch and has smoother animations; this work is now largely done and it represents a major improvement! (Vlad Zahorodnii, Marco Martin, and Arjen Hiemstra, 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

We’re hosting our Plasma 6 fundraiser right now and need your help! Thanks to you we’re now at 91% of our goal of 500 new KDE e.V. supporting members! That’s really 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!

Published by Nate

Published

12 thoughts on “This week in KDE: un-flashy important stability work”

  1. Awesome work as always, guys. Nate, I was wondering if, after Plasma 6, given that Plasma appears to be feature-complete or close to it, the project might shift its focus. Will there be a move to slow down the addition of new features, and will new guidelines be implemented for features to have before they are accepted into the project? And mainly put a greater emphasis on improving the features that are already part of the project.

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  4. So excited for this release!

    Since you mentioned Spectacle’s rectangular région mode, there’s an issue due to which when the rectangle reaches all the way down to/near the bottom of the screen, the annotation toolbar is outside the view area and therefore not usable.

    I dunno if a bug report exists for this already, else I can create one.

    Thanks for the amazing work!

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  5. On Plasma 6, on the overview effect, is there a way to get rid of the overly exaggerated GNOME-like rounded corners around the desktop?

    I know a handful of people that moved away from GNOME shell, for disliking these round-y corners UI additions here and there, and I always recommended KDE as an alternative for a more sane/professional look, and that we (as in KDE) keep away from these fashion of the season looks.

    I am afraid I can no long use this as an argument if someone is trying to avoid those.

    Having the screen background padded is a nice effect, but making their corners full circle round doesn’t make any sense, why not keep them squared as they appear on the screen display?

    In my opinion, changing the shape of something you want to abstractly represent, as such the overview effect tries to give the user a bird’s-eye view of what they currently have opened, is like showing a fork picture and asking the listener to imagine it is a spoon.

    If the screen has square corners, why can’t we just keep those corners square?

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  7. I just wanted to bring the issue #473602 to your attention, which causes applications like Dolphin, Konsole, Gwenview, … crash randomly when screen enter or exits sleep. This has been happening to me multiple times every single day in since last year (I’m possibly susceptible because I have two monitors of different brands with slightly different wake up times), and significantly affects the quality of life.

    Several weeks ago, it was finally promoted to be among one of the Very High Priority issues, and there was an MR: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/4590 but it is unfortunately stalled, with no signs of getting forward, so after almost 2 years, KDE apps keep crashing multiple times every day…

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    1. The crash is not specific to X11 by the way, it reliably happens on Wayland as well, so I believe fixing this is important for Plasma 6 as well.

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  9. How compatible will KDE 5 themes be with KDE 6? I am very particular about my desktop customization and I would be rather upset if my theme were rendered unusable.

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    1. Plasma Styles are compatible.

      Anything that includes any QML code though will not be compatible and will need to be changed. This includes most Global Themes, because they generally include elements with QML code.

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