This week in KDE: Holiday bug fixes

Like last week, the focus remained on getting the mega-release ready for, well, a mega release! Along the way folks have been starting their well-earned vacations, so the pace of work understandably decreased a bit. Accordingly, this will be the last regular weekly post of the year, with at least next week’s skipped, and possibly the next two. Happy holidays, everyone! Rest and recharge so we can hit the ground running in 2024. 🙂

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: 216

UI improvements

The Breeze icon theme’s smartphone icons have been overhauled and modernized to reflect what phones actually look like today (Áron Kovács, link):

System Settings’ Font Management page has gotten a visual modernization to be more in line with the new frameless style in Plasma 6 (Carl Schwan, link):

Windows that don’t show up in the Task Manager or the Alt+Tab Task Switcher no longer appear semi-invisibly in the Overview effect (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Breeze-themed non-editable frameless tabs (e.g. the tabs of a tabbed tool view or settings page) now expand to fill the available space by default, as there’s really no reason not to (Carl Schwan, link)

Improved the text contrast for certain accent colors (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

After pasting a file into a Dolphin window, if the file would end up at a location that’s currently out of view, the view scrolls to it so you can see it (Méven Car, link)

Okular’s “Show Signatures Panel” button now also opens the sidebar containing the signatures panel, if it happened to be closed at the time (Albert Astals Cid, link)

Elisa now supports cover images in the Webp format (Jack Hill, 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!

The screen locker has a fallback theme that appears when your active lock screen theme is broken. However when the fallback theme itself is broken for some reason, now the screen locker process breaks with the dreaded “your lock screen is broken” message rather than failing to lock the screen at all, which is worse (Joshua Goins, link)

File dialogs from a variety of Qt-yet-non-KDE apps will now have their name filters set correctly (Nicolas Fella, link)

When using a fractional scale factor, the Breeze window decoration theme’s window outlines no longer exhibit minor visual glitches (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed an issue that could result in cursors leaving trails behind them when using a fractional scale factor and certain graphics cards that don’t support hardware cursors (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Widgets that have been assigned keyboard shortcuts should now be more reliable about remembering them. This probably alleviates or fixes a lot of the “Can’t activate Kickoff with the meta key” bugs! (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Memory usage for NVIDIA GPUs is now represented with the correct unit in various System Monitor widgets and the app of the same name (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

When using a Bluetooth headset with integrated volume buttons, pushing them now always shows the volume change OSD (Bharadwaj Raju, link)

System Settings’ Task Switcher page no longer confusingly uses the word “backtab”, and the backwards-looking task switching invoked using Alt+Shift+Tab now works continuously if you hold it down (Yifan Zhu, link 1 and link 2)

The scrollbars of scrollable menus in QtQuick-based apps no longer inappropriately overlap the menu items (Tomislav Pap, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 35 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 34 last week). Current list of bugs
• 155 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed this week. Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Okular has now been ported to Qt 6 (Nicolas Fella, Sune Vuorela, and Carl Schwan. link)

The Wacom Tablet applet has now been ported to Qt 6 (Nicolas Fella, link)

Fixed one source of hangs in Dolphin when browsing a slow Samba share–this time having to do with bottlenecks generating thumbnails (Harald Sitter, link)

Reduced the memory usage of screen recording using KPipeWire. This won’t entirely fix the issue of screen recording taking up too much memory, but it makes a big difference already and should prevent outright resource exhaustion (Arjen Hiemstra, link 1 and link 2)

The DrKonqi crash reporter is now capable of recording and reporting crashes of the Powerdevil power management subsystem (Harald Sitter, link)

Automation & Systematization

Added an autotest to make sure the Emoji Selector window works (Fushan Wen, 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 98% of our goal of 500 new KDE e.V. supporting members! That’s right, 98%!!! I bet we can get over the 500 mark before Christmas, and a little birdie might have told me that if we do, there could be stretch goals. 🙂 So if you like the work we’re doing, spreading the wealth via this fundraiser 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!