This week in KDE: a deluge of new features

Automation & Systematization, This Week in KDE 6 Minutes

The floodgates are fully open and developers have started landing juicy features for Plasma 6.1!

But not just that… we asked for bug reports and you folks gave us bug reports! Usually we get 30-50 per day, but now we’re up to 150-200. It’s kind of crazy.

Now, this doesn’t mean the software is actually really buggy. It means that people are using the software! Most of the bug reports actually not about KDE issues at all: graphics driver issues, bugs in themes, and bugs in 3rd-party apps. And many are duplicates of existing known issues, or really weird exotic issues only reproducible with specific combinations of off-by-default settings.

Of course some are more significant, but at this point I think we’ve got most of them fixed. There are still a couple open–such as slow login and black lock screens with certain setups–but both have open merge requests to fix them, so I expect those to be fixed pretty soon too.

New Features

You can now split embedded terminal views in Kate horizontally or vertically (Akseli Lahtinen, Kate 24.05. Link)

You can now configure whether the magnifier in Spectacle’s Rectangular Region mode is always on, always off, or only on while holding down the Shift key (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link)

There are now “edge barrier” and “corner barrier” features when you’ve using a multi-screen setup. These barriers add virtual spacing between screens, so that it’s easier for you to click on the pixels touching shared screen edges. Why would you want to do this? For example to make auto-hide panels between screens possible, and to make it easy to click the close button of a maximized window with another screen next to it. Note that these features are Wayland-only. And yes, you can turn these features off if you don’t like them, and also adjust the size of the barrier’s virtual space (Yifan Zhu, Plasma 6.1):

You can now hide the Web Browser widget’s navigation bar, making it suitable for cases where it’s simply monitoring the same web page you never navigate away from (Shubham Arora, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Manual session saving now works on Wayland. Note that until real session restore is added, this will be hooking into the “real fake session restore” feature I blogged about a few weeks ago (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1. Link)

UI Improvements

When you have Spectacle configured to not take a screenshot when launched, the window that appears on launch now gives you the opportunity to take a screen recording too (Noah Davis, 24.05. Link)

Search results for pages in System Settings now better prioritize exact name matches (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Using a keyboard shortcut to activate the Calculator widget on a Panel now passes focus to it correctly so you can start typing to calculate things immediately (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

When using the Kicker Application Menu launcher, you can now do calculation and unit conversion, and find the power and session actions by searching for them (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link)

The new “Shake cursor to find it” effect is now enabled by default (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1. Link)

The new Printers page in System Settings now does a better job of helping you figure out what to do next when it finds a driverless network printer that doesn’t have the right drivers installed (yes, that sounds like a contradiction, but such is life) (Mike Noe, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Panel widgets’ popups now close when you click on an empty area of the Task Manager (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1. Link)

By default, XWayland apps are now allowed to listen for non-alphanumeric keypresses, and shortcuts using modifier keys. This lets any global shortcut features they may have work with no user intervention required, while still not allowing arbitrary listening for alphanumeric keypresses which could potentially be used maliciously (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Bluetooth connection failures are now additionally mentioned in the widget pop-up itself, right next to the thing you clicked on to try the connection which is where your eyeballs were probably still looking (Patrik Fábián, Plasma 6.1. Link)

The width of the clipboard history popup that appears when you press Meta+V now has a width that’s capped at a lower, more sane level when you’re using an ultrawide screen (Dominique Hummel, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Bug Fixes

Gwenview no longer crashes when opening certain FITS image files (Albert Astals Cid, Gwenview 24.02.1. Link)

Minimizing a Dolphin window no longer causes all of its panels to get hidden (Nicolas Fella, Dolphin 24.02.1. Link)

Fixed a glitch with multi-line text selection in Okular (Okular 24.02.1. Link)

While dragging a file in Dolphin, if it happens to pass over other files and linger there for a bit, the other files no longer get immediately opened (Akseli Lahtinen, Dolphin 24.05. Link)

Plasma no longer crashes when you open Kickoff or Kicker while uninstalling an app that’s in the Favorites list (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Launching/activating items with the Enter key in the Kicker Application Menu once again works (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

“Get [app name]” search results from KRunner once again work (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Fixed a regression with System Tray icon support that caused some apps’ tray icons to show the wrong icon (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

When you drag multiple files from Dolphin onto the desktop, they no longer stack on top of one another until Plasma is restarted (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Discover no longer crashes when you search for various fairly common terms, including “libreoffice” (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Fixed the “Move to Desktop > All Desktops” titlebar menu item on X11 (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Fixed a case where Plasma could exit (not crash) with a Wayland protocol error after turning screens off and back on again (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Fixed a case where KWin could crash when a window was opened on a secondary screen plugged into a secondary GPU (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Our previous fix for VLC and MPV not being able to go full screen turned out not to be enough, so we beefed it up, and now it should actually always work (Łukasz Patron, Plasma 6.0.2. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a bug that could cause Night Color to not work on systems with certain graphics hardware (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

The first search result in the Kicker Application Menu is no longer sometimes covered up by the search field (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

When you drag a window off the left side of the screen on X11, the cursor no longer moves unexpectedly (Yifan Zhu, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Setting your system language to “C” on System Settings’ Region & Language page no longer mangles the text of the previews for individual formats (Han Young, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)

Fixed a case where Discover could crash on launch when its Flatpak backend is active (David Redondo, Plasma 6.1. Link)

When you have a Panel at the top of the screen, showing its config dialog no longer overlaps the global Edit Mode Toolbar; instead, the toolbar jumps down to the bottom of the screen where there’s plenty of space for it (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Downloading items in the “Get New [thing]” dialogs that only have a single file available once again works (Akseli Lahtinen, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

Various actions throughout KDE apps that open the default terminal app–such as Dolphin’s “Open Terminal Here” menu item–once again work (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

“Horizontal bars” graphs in various System Monitor widgets now use the right colors (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

Menu items in context menus for text fields in QtQuick-based apps are now translated (Evgeny Chesnokov, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

Made a bunch of places icons in the Breeze icon theme respect the accent color, just like their compatriots (Someone going by the pseudonym “leia uwu”, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

Other bug information of note:

Performance & Technical

Fixed a source of lag and frame drops on some systems with certain graphics hardware (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Automation & Systematization

Wrote a tutorial for how to set up automatic publishing of your KDE app to KDE’s F-Droid repository (Ingo Klöcker, Link)

Updated the tutorial for how to write a System Settings page (KCM) to reflect modernity (Akseli Lahtinen, Link)

Added an autotest ensuring that a special feature of KConfig and desktops files works (David Faure, 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

Please help with bug triage! The Bugzilla volumes are extraordinary right now and we are overwhelmed. I’ll be doing another blog post on this tomorrow; for now, if you’re interested, read this.

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!

As a final reminder, 99.9% of KDE runs on labor that KDE e.V. didn’t pay for. If you’d like to help change that, consider donating today!

Published by Nate

Published

21 thoughts on “This week in KDE: a deluge of new features”

  2. This week’s bug fix section feels like it’s 5x longer than usual. Great job everyone!

    I also submitted 3 bugs 2 days ago and you quickly forwarded them to the people who should know about them. Thanks!

    Liked by 1 person

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  3. I think it’s still valid to link to the Fundraiser, we are now at 902 members!! Let’s get the 1000 until Plasma 6.1! ❤

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  4. If only I could open Discovery without it crashing I could install these bugfixes. “KDE isn’t buggy, it’s everything else that interacts with it” is such a BS.

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    1. You don’t need to rely on Discover, you can always install updates via your terminal.

      Depending on your distro:

      Arch: `pacman -Syu`

      Neon: `pkcon refresh && pkcon update`

      Fedora: `dnf upgrade –refresh`

      openSUSE: `zypper refresh && zypper dup`

      As an early adopter (Plasma 6.0.{very low number}) bugs are kind of expected.

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    2. Of course there are actual bugs in KDE software, due to the incredible diversity of environments in which people use it which is vastly beyond what the core dev team can test. But we can’t fix those bugs if we don’t know about them, which is why we rely on bug reports.

      Like

  5. Forgot to ask on the post last week, do you know why after upgrading to Plasma 6, VLC got installed? And I can’t remove it because of:removing vlc breaks dependency ‘vlc’ required by phonon-qt6-vlc

    And removing that gives:

    removing phonon-qt6-vlc breaks dependency ‘phonon-qt6-backend’ required by phonon-qt6

    Also, krename looks ugly after the upgrade, wrong theme and ugly mouse, see: https://imgur.com/a/9bZBksT

    Aside from that, great update and great new stuff coming!

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    1. you’re on arch or something arch based, I guess. Arch doesn’t split libvlc from vlc so anything that requires libvlc in the background pulls in vlc as a dependency. You probably had a different phonon backend on plasma 5, but those are afaik no longer available, which is why you might not have had that problem before.

      As for the other issue, you have to have plasma5-integration and breeze5 installed. If that doesn’t solve the cursor problem, make sure you have followed this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Cursor_themes#XDG_specification

      Liked by 1 person

    2. I am on Arch indeed, forgot to mention that.

      Thanks for the packages, installed those, and now it looks proper again, including the mouse!

      Liked by 2 people

    4. I assume you’re using Arch Linux, correct?

      If you are, that’s why. The phonon-qt6-backend package should technically only require libvlc (and not the entire VLC program), but Arch does not split VLC into smaller parts, so you get the whole thing.

      A long time ago someone proposed the split of VLC, but it was declined: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/21934.html

      If you are an mpv user (and that’s why you see no need for VLC), you can install phonon-qt6-mpv-git from the AUR instead.

      Liked by 1 person

    1. I have no idea. There are many reasons why this could be, and you’ll have to do your own research to find out for yourself which reason applies to your personal setup.

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  8. I’ve just updated and the update process was really smooth and without any problems. Only small bugs here and there which I reported all of them.

    I had longstanding issues with Nvidia and Wayland and now many of them are gone.

    hopefully the problem with Nvidia and xwayland will be fixed soon enough.

    Thank you guys.

    Liked by 1 person

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  9. There are now “edge barrier” and “corner barrier” features when you’ve using a multi-screen setup. … And yes, you can turn these features off if you don’t like them

    Maybe this feature should be more discoverable. As it is very annoying if you don’t want it. And I do not: I have two screens placed one on top of other, and panel is at the right side of bottom display. Can’t see a reason for this feature for me, though I can imagine it would be helpful some people. What I’m complaining about is how hard to find it, searching for “barrier” in systemsettings gives nothing.

    Another somewhat related question. At some time in the past there was nice behaviour: when two displays have different size and mouse is moved to edge where no other screen, mouse was moved (kinda teleported) to other screen anyway. Maybe this image would be more descriptive, mouse is moving from top to bottom. Sorry for ugly drawing.

    This dot-dot-dot teleporting was nice, but it had gone, was present only at some early Plasma 6 stages. Maybe it’s still there and could be enabled somehow?

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    1. The barrier features are in the future 6.1 release (this is a dev blog which is about features/fixes that generally won’t be in distribution packages at the time the blog is published). So unless you’ve built Plasma from source very recently, you’re version won’t have this feature (and therefore it can’t be searched for).

      I expect this feature will be off/0px by default so you would only have to search for it if you want to turn it on.

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    2. I’m using openSUSE Tumbleweed KDE:Unstable repository, which has 6.1. This feature was present, but search gave nothing. Right now search is working too.

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    3. I expect this feature will be off/0px by default so you would only have to search for it if you want to turn it on.

      It’s 100px by default right now.

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  10. I think most bugs go unreported because it takes too much effort given the high probability of your bug never getting read much less fixed. I routinely see critical bugs that are five or ten years old in linux desktop-related projects. KDE presents its own set of challenges given how many moving parts it has given its configurability.

    I think a bug reporting app (one that would pull system information, not just the app version) with notification updates regarding the priority of the bug would facilitate more reports. It basically just needs to be easier to report bugs and get some kind of feedback.

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