In addition to lots and lots of Plasma 6 stability work and the beginning of Plasma 6.1 feature work, Dolphin received large amount of development this week, resulting in some nice improvements. Check it out!
New Features
KSSHAskPass (which has the best name of any app in the world, change my mind) now supports SK-type SSH keys (Franz Baumgärtner, KSSHAskPass 24.05. Link)
Gave the Web Browser widget the option to always load a specific page every time, or remember the last-browsed-to one (Shubham Arora, Plasma 6.1. Link):
Info Center has a new page showing you technical audio information for debugging purposes (Shubham Arora, Plasma 6.1. Link)
The icon chooser dialog now has a filter so you can see only symbolic icons, or no symbolic icons (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.1. Link):
UI Improvements
Dolphin’s icon once again changes with the accent color (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 24.02.1. Link)
Most of Dolphin’s bars now animate appearing and disappearing (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 24.05. Link):
Some folders in Dolphin get special view settings applied by default, such as the Trash and Recent Files/Folders locations. Now these special view settings get applied to those folders even if you’re using the “use same view settings for all folders” setting (Jin Liu, Dolphin 24.05. Link)
Dolphin now has a new tab in its settings window for settings about its panels, which were previously hidden away in a context menu. So far just the Information Panel is represented there, but others may be added later! (Benedikt Thiemer, Dolphin 24.05. Link):
Made touch scrolling in Konsole work better (Willian Wang, Konsole 24.05. Link)
Improved the way Konsole’s text cursor scales on Wayland, especially with fractional scale factors (Luis Javier Merino Morán, Konsole 24.05. Link)
Okular already lets you scroll around a document with the hjkl keys. Now if you hold down the Shift key while doing it, it scrolls 10 times faster! (Someone going by the pseudonym “GI GI”, Okular 24.05. Link)
KRunner-powered search fields in Overview and the Search widget show the same search ordering that other ones already do (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)
The Power and Energy widget now hides its “Show Battery percentage on icon when not fully charged” option when the system has no batteries (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)
With non-random wallpaper slideshows, Plasma now remembers the last-seen one and starts from there the next time you log in (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)
Improved keyboard navigation in Kirigami sidebars powered by the GlobalDrawer component (Carl Schwan, Frameworks 6.1. Link)
Increased the size of the “Get new Plasma Widgets” dialog (Me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.1. Link)
Bug Fixes
Fixed one source of issues with the lock screen breaking on X11 by showing a black background. There may be more, and we’re on the case for those too (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)
Fixed a way that the Battery Monitor widget could cause Plasma to crash (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)
Fixed a way that Plasma could crash when you middle-click tasks in the Task Manager, or rapidly left-click on random audio-playing tasks (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.2, Link 1 and link 2)
On X11, clicks no longer get eaten on part of top panels (Yifan Zhu, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)
On X11, lock and sleep inhibitions once again work (Jakub Gocoł, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)
Fixed most of the incorrectly-colored System Tray icons when using mixed dark/light themes. There’s still one remaining source of this that we found, which is also being worked on (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)
You can once again scrub through songs played in Spotify using the Media Player widget (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)
Fixed several issues with panel widgets (including Kickoff) incorrectly passing focus to their parent panel when activated (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)
Dragging widgets to or from panels no longer sometimes causes Plasma to crash or makes the widget get stuck in ghost form on the desktop (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.3. Link 1 and link 2)
On Wayland, adding a second keyboard layout now causes the relevant System Tray widget to appear immediately, rather than only after Plasma or the system was restarted (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)
Fixed a way that Bluetooth pairing could fail (Ajrat Makhmutov, Plasma 6.0.3, Link)
On X11, the screen chooser OSD works again (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)
Breeze GTK is once again the default GTK theme (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)
Yet again fixed the login sound so that it actually plays (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)
Reverted to an older and better way of sending pointer events on Wayland, which fixes multiple issues involving windows and cursors teleporting unexpectedly while dragging to maximize or de-maximize windows (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)
Fixed a bunch of weird cursor issues with GPUs that don’t support variable refresh rate properly (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1. Link)
Fixed a source of xdg-desktop-portal crashes on boot (David Redondo, Frameworks 6.1 Link)
Fixed two issues with the “Get New [thing]” dialogs that caused them to not show installation progress correctly, and get stuck after uninstalling something (Akseli Lahtinen, Frameworks 6.1. Link 1 and link 2)
System Monitor charts now appear properly for users of 10+ year-old Intel integrated GPUs (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 6.1. Link)
More UI elements throughout QtQuick-based KDE software stop animating when animations are globally disabled, which also fixes an issue where Plasma button highlights would disappear with animations are globally disabled (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.1. Link 1 and link 2)
Other bug information of note:
- 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 2 last week). Current list of bugs
- 36 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
- 207 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over last week. Full list of bugs
Performance & Technical
Fixed a source of 25-second Plasma startup delays when using KDE Connect with Bluetooth disabled or absent (Simon Redman, the next KDE Connect release, though most distros have already backported it. Link)
Fixed another source of slow Plasma startups caused by using the Bing picture of the day wallpaper (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.2. Link)
KWin now does direct scan-out even for rotated screens (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1. Link)
Reduced the size of all the wallpapers in the plasma-workspace-wallpapers repo by 10 MB (Martin Rys, Plasma 6.1. Link)
Ported Kile to KDE Frameworks 6. Hopefully this should presage a new release soon (Carl Schwan, link)
Automation & Systematization
Wrote a tutorial about setting up your app’s continuous integration system to package and publish to the Windows store (Ingo Klöcker, link)
Added some autotests for X11-specific window behavior (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Other
Rewrote a some chunks of text on KDE neon’s website to make it reflect reality: it is a distro, its target users are those who want KDE stuff fast and can tolerate some instability, and you shouldn’t use the package manager to get apps (me: Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)
…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!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Well done, folks! Love to read every episode.
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You’re ending the “Totally-not-a-distro” neon joke?!?!
nooooo!!!!
how will I start my stand up comedy act now?!
(now seriously: you finally ended that joke!!! Great call!!!)
Not so sure about the “use same view settings for all folders” not actually using the same view settings for all folders…
if it says “use same view settings for all folders” that’s what it should do
Then there be an extra option to “exclude special folders” from this setting! I believe it would avoid confusing the user!
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Aha, that was in fact anticipated! There’s a little disclaimer text under the option that tells you it might not be respected by certain special folders.
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Been watching from the sidelines at the s**tshow that is KDE Neon and Plasma 6 at the moment.. Hopefully 6.1 will smooth things out because this has hurt KDE quite badly. I have had people that don’t really follow/read any linux blogs/news tell me how they heard Plasma 6 is crap to avoid. The news/rumors have spread quickly, and we all know that even if they aren’t true the fact that people believe so is a bummer. In other somewhat related news, the other linux rockstar Zorin OS 17 is also off to a rocky start with users having endless issues even though the distro is based on an ancient “stable” Ubuntu base. Let’s see if GNOME hits the ground running, or a wall.. Quite a buzz going on for Pop OS and the Cosmic thingy too. Weird, rocky times right now. Microsoft are smiling.
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Big releases are hard, especially when there’s been a lot of hype.
Neon aside, overall I’d say it’s gone fairly well, at least by historical standards. Maybe it wasn’t an Apple-quality release, but we aren’t playing with a trillion dollars worth of paid engineering talent here. So yeah, we can learn and do better, but there’s only so much blood you can squeeze from that stone.
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@Nate
Mailing to distros about backports recommendation is a great practice.
I guess Dolphin “Open Terminal Here” broken action on X11 worth mentioning as well
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=482107
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Yeah not a bad idea, since Frameworks 6.1 won’t be released for almost 3 weeks.
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That’s super cool, will the Location and Info panel as well as the menu also be supported in the future?
Thank you Felix!
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PS It would be even cooler in terms of consistency if this became the default for all kind of Plasmas apps!
Isn’t it possible to implement this animation in a more general way for panel components, so that there’s little to do to adjust all apps?
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In older QtWidgets apps like Dolphin, implementing this kind of thing is quite tricky; just look at the size of the diff in the merge request. It’s much simpler in QtQuick apps, which is why you see a lot more animations there. This make sense, since one of the reasons why QtQuick was developed was to offer a simpler developer UX around animations.
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You are welcome!
No, there is currently nobody planning to implement animations for the Places or Information panel. Everyone is welcome to try though!
>Isn’t it possible to implement this animation in a more general way for panel components, so that there’s little to do to adjust all apps?
I am not sure! The Dolphin case is special/more difficult in some sense because we need to be careful not to change the size of the Places panel by accident when a bar appears. This might be less of a problem in other places.
That being said, the code I used here can quite easily be adapted to many other bars or panels. This approach isn’t as simple as adding a single line saying “animate now” unfortunately, but in Dolphin we now only need to add like 7 lines of code in the best case for height-changing animations.
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KDE Plasma 6.0.2 (Wayland) working nicely, fast and stable here (Arch Linux).
Good job.
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Does KDE have a features roadmap, what features will be worked on for 6.1, 6.2 etc? Could not find it anywhere.
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Most KDE projects including Plasma can not produce a reliable feature roadmap because a large amount of features are contributed by volunteers, who often drop by unannounced with useful improvements. Or volunteers who might promise something, but don’t manage to get the feature into Plasma on time or at all.
Individual developers have some ideas about what they might look into, and if one hangs out in KDE developer chatrooms / mailing lists there are a few things to learn. No public commitments though.
The best we can do in a community of volunteers is to rally around certain focus areas, a.k.a. https://community.kde.org/Goals, and use popular messaging channels such as Nate’s blog to stoke interest and excitement. Even so, the impact of these initiatives is limited because you can’t tell volunteers what to work on. They have to decide by themselves how they prefer to help out.
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Why KDe users cannot take benefits from Nvidia drivers on Wayland software limited to Mesa LLVMPIPE software based-rendering which involves the CPU? No hardware acceleration is provided for Wayland software in Wayland session. Differently, other Plasma operating systems implement Nvidia drivers able to bring hardware acceleration, for example Arch. Ubuntu software is limited enough about Wayland till now because its Nvidia packages is restricted.
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I’m trying to answer the call and get involved in bug triage. It’s really satisfying and loads of fun. I thoroughly recommend anyone with a spare PC or VM on which they can install Neon to give it a go and try to duplicate bug reports. Hust follow the instructions in Nate’s blog.
There is lots you can learn from this task, but the main takeaway for me is that it is us KDE fans (me, and you) who make this all happen, plus the magician devs of course. There is no corporate help desk or back office sitting full time at KDE HQ. But that’s a good thing – see a bug you’re interested in, help out, and get it fixed. For me, I knew this already, but getting hands-on with the triage really helped me understand it first hand. Now I feel, in a small way, part of the team.
Right now there are 386 bugs needing to be triaged in the inbox (and that’s just the bugs raised in the last week). I’ve set myself a challenge to try to triage more than are arriving and therefore bring down the numbers. Who fancies helping out?
https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bugidtype=include&chfield=%5BBug%20creation%5D&chfieldfrom=7d&chfieldto=Now&list_id=2648743
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It really is true. Thanks so much for your help, Nick! I’ve noticed your contributions already and they are appreciated. I had to take a break from bug triage last week due to feeling overwhelmed and also writing a new HIG for KDE apps, so I feel good that others are picking up some of the work and we don’t end up with all those bugs dropped on the floor.
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I’m really loving how stable KDE neon is running 6.0.1, I’m just so impressed and happy with it. All the extra time that was put into polishing really shows!
“Some folders in Dolphin get special view settings applied by default, such as the Trash and Recent Files/Folders locations.” …. Excellent! The default setting in Dolphin to use a common display style for all folders was something that I immediately turned off when I set up a new environment for a friend or a client. Downloads, Pictures, Music, Documents… these all beg to have a display style that is germane to their type of data.
“Most of Dolphin’s bars now animate appearing and disappearing” … Cool! Really appreciate the effort to making Dolphin shine.
“Info Center has a new page showing you technical audio information for debugging purposes”… Very nice! Info Center is becoming a welcome part of my diagnostic toolkit. And for non-technical people, it shows them that they can inspect their machine without resorting to the command line, which turns them off.
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Just read this horrorshow https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1bixmbx/do_not_install_global_themes_some_wipe_out_all Maybe there should be some corner on the internet that hosts curated, tested and safe themes for Plasma 6..? Certified by KDE Plasma 6 – Themes. Extra work, sure, but I would rather choose from say 5-10 themes that work flawlessly than choose from a couple hundred themes where no one knows what will happen after applying them.
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