This week I’d like to highlight a very cool development: the automatic crash reporting facility in the Plasma 6 version of our venerable DrKonqi crash report wizard. Automatic reporting is opt-in, but so far lots of people are opting in, and we’re using this data to get a much better picture of the crashes that our users are actually experiencing than we ever could using Bugzilla! Using this system, at least three such important crashes were fixed this week, two by Fushan Wen (link 1 and link 2) and one by Vlad Zahorodnii (link)–and possibly even more than I missed!
These reports make a difference; they’re not a black hole. So if something crashes, please do use the automatic crash reporting feature in DrKonqi!
In addition, quite a lot of technical and performance work was merged, especially for Discover and the Baloo file indexer. Finally, features and UI polishing are starting to land in Plasma 6.1. In addition to everything listed here, there’s something big that I can’t mention yet since it’s not 100% merged yet, but only 95%! Hopefully next week. 🙂 So stay tuned for that!
New Features
The Power and Battery widget now responds to middle-clicks and scrolls: middle-click will block or re-enable automatic sleep and screen locking, and scrolling will change the active power profile (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1. Link)
UI Improvements
The Power and Battery widget now shows an appropriate icon when you manually block sleep and screen locking (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1. Link 1 and link 2):
Some of the menu items and toolbar buttons in the desktop context menu and global Edit Mode toolbar are now more concise (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link):
The opening and closing animations for expandable List Items in Plasma system tray widgets now respect the global animation speed, and are also a bit faster and more responsive-feeling in general (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link)
“Get new [thing]” dialogs throughout KDE software are now sorted by highest number of downloads first (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 6.1. Link)
Bug Fixes
Fixed a common crash in Discover related to refreshing KNewStuff content (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)
The bug where clicking on certain panel widgets would inappropriately transfer focus to the panel is now actually fixed. It turns out that it was in fact fixed before as well for people living on git master, but I forgot to backport half of it to the stable branch, so it didn’t take effect. Sorry about that. But even if I had, it would have broken other things as it turned out to not be the right fix. This week we have a much better fix that fixes everything and breaks nothing! 🙂 (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.0.3. Link 1 and link 2)
Power and session actions once again work for people not using the systemd-enabled boot process (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)
Fixed multiple related issues that would cause panels to switch to a different screen on wake-up or login when using a multi-screen setup with an AMD GPU (David Redondo, Plasma 6.0.3. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)
It’s once again possible to disable Presentation Mode via the same way you enabled it, in the Display Configuration widget (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)
Syncing your settings to SDDM now also syncs the scale factor and screen arrangement correctly on systems where SDDM is running on KWin as a Wayland server rather than Xorg as an X server (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)
Fixed multiple minor glitches with Task Manager window thumbnails related to them being sometimes cut off, displaced, or never showing up at all (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)
Fixed an issue that could cause Discover to crash at launch under certain circumstances (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)
In the Plasma X11 session, the Desktop Grid page on the Overview effect can now be closed using the same keyboard shortcut (Meta+G by default) that was used to open it (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)
Fixed a case where Plasma could crash after changing the panel position on certain setups (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.1. Link)
Fixed a case where the Baloo file indexer could crash after you created or renamed files or folders (Méven Car, Frameworks 6.1. Link)
Other bug information of note:
- 4 Very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 3 last week). Current list of bugs
- 35 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 34 last week). Current list of bugs
- 209 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week! Full list of bugs
Performance & Technical
Discover is now much faster about showing reviews for apps, especially when doing so immediately after the app is launched (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.3. Link)
Discover is now also faster about displaying information about large offline updates (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.0.4. Link)
The Baloo file indexer no longer tries to index content on temporarily mounted file systems, such as network shares and overlayfs mounts (Adam Fontenot, Frameworks 6.1. Link)
The list of recently-accessed files that gets saved to disk by open/save dialogs and other consumers of KFileWidget now gets written to the config file for volatile state data, not user-directed config data (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.1. 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 still pretty high right now and help is appreciated. 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 
Is the “something big” explicit sync support in KWin? 😄
Also, regarding the SDDM-on-Wayland fix, there’s just one thing keeping me from using it still: How do I set the keyboard layout & variant? My current setup used localectl to set the X11 keymap/variant, and when I’m logged into Plasma Wayland I have the layout set through System Settings.
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Maybe the “something big” is the return of Amarok
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Is Plasma 6.1 scheduled for release this fall?
New icons planned for 6.1? Are they being worked on?
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https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_6
6.1 is scheduled for June!
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Great week of development as always – almost: Do you know if any KDE software is affected by the xz backdoor?
This reminds me of the pretty recent, not directly but somehow related issue with the get new things store: http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/kde-store-content/
Do you think it would make sense for KDE to open a job opportunity for a security researcher or pen tester, which could analyze the critical codebase and help to make Plasma securer than ever?
I would definitely be happy to see the funding go in this direction. This could then also be used as an advertisement for Plasma: Simpleby Default, Powerful when Needed and Verified Secure!
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If the compromised version of x1 is on your system, every piece of software that links against it is affected. As such, it’s really more of an issue affecting distros, not apps. KDE Neon was not affected as it ships an older version of xz (and libarchive too, which the perpetrator may also have compromised).
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https://kde.org/fundraisers/plasma6member/
981 members, we should easily go over the 1000 by 6.1! 🎉🚀
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I personally hope that “something big” is either the – plasma reset feature – or the ability for the system to – apply updates on shutdown.
But, considering the lack of movement on the related bug reports, I don’t have high hopes on either…
Great work, as always!!!
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KDE Plasma 6.0.3 working ok here (Arch).
Good job.
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This is already reported as a bug but just wanted to bring this into your attention since this would classify as a 1 minute bug. In Plasma 6, the quicklaunch menu size is dynamically adjusted depending on how many windows are open in the taskbar (which is usually different in each desktop). I keep playing whack-a-mole when trying to click on a quicklaunch icon.
It would be nice if this is finally fixed…
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Quicklaunch is a very neglected widget; no one I know on the dev team uses it. It’s something that I think is at risk of being dropped due to neglect if no one steps up to properly maintain it.
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Nate: “something big”
Me: please be touchpad-gesture configuration!
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I have a long time bug on dolphin that overflow name label in icon view and leave artefact when changing file (not a critical bug but i see it every day since years as i use dolphin multiple time a day). I have look in the bugzilla and the bug is report multiple time since 2020 but never confirm and so never work. I have found :
459395 / 469723 / 432530 / 449232 / 425502 / 435771 / 470596 / 459395
to be report of this bug… Is it possible to give this bug some love. I am sorry to ask this here, but i don’t know what else to do. Dolphin is for me the second most important software of kde after Konsole.
Thanks and keep the good work
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Does anyone knows why the context menu when I right click on the desktop it’s not translucent in Wayland? Works OK(ish) on X11 ( blur doesn’t). Using Intel iGPU.
The panel works as it should, would be amazing if it worked the same on menus.
P.S. I am using Neon. Does the same on Kubuntu on KDE 5.27 on a different laptop with same CPU/GPU.
Is this a known bug? Regards
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Great to see improvements coming for Discover and the Baloo file indexer. I find that Discover is now fast enough for me, but Baloo needs some improvements, especially with not making the system appear to run slower while it’s indexing for the first time.
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Great work as always! Keep it up! 🙂 I don’t know if this has been reported, but I’m having this issue that when I right-click on a window to open the context menu (more actions), the menu appears on the right corner of the desktop, it happens in every app. You can see here what I’m talking about https://imgur.com/uyyUDAJ
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It’s known: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=480864. At this point it looks like a bug in Qt itself; see the comments in there.
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You know what?! Seeing all the bugs we, readers, post here as replies makes me have a gorgeous idea i bet almost everyone will agree (well… maybe except nate…):
I vote for the creation of Nate’s Blog Bugs tag.
This will be a special tag: it will get total priority (kind of everyone must stop everything) and fix the bugs submitted under the tag in less that 3 hours? And they’ll get fixed by the reply post order!
What do you all think? Who’s with me?!
ahahahah (i’m joking, in case you didn’t noticed it XP )
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So, does Baloo finally work decently?
I ditched it like 4 years ago for Recoll since Baloo was a royal crap, release after release, that didnt find almost anything. But Recoll, isnt integrated into Plasma at all, and its interface sucks, so I’d love to go back and remove Recoll (and its huge database).
Anyone here who is user of advanced text search features could please confirm if Baloo has finally become *really* usable, I mean for serious work? Thanks in avance.
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No, unfortunatelly, not. Baloo keeps being unable to find text in half -and maybe I’m being generous- of the indexed text files even if it has them in front of its nose. It doesn’t even find stuff in mails, calendars, taskes, etc. And if you use it into Dolphin, it shows the search result it is able to get 2 or 3 times. All these bugs have been reported years ago by meny of us but developers seem to think that making a piece of software work as expected is not very important -then people says MacOS is overrated…-.
So don’t remove Recoll. Its interface is dèsigned with the feet and its database can weigh easily 10 GB is you have a lot of files indexed, but it works, yes.
Someone -I don’t feel like it due to my bug reporting experience- should ask Plasma developers to abandon Baloo and use Recoll’s engine for desktop and PIM search.
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As we all know, Arch doesn’t have debug codes by default (and that is why it’s so slick and speedy), so crashes reports were useless. Since some time crash-wizard is offering downloading those codes. However, I could never reach the end of the process. It’s increadibly slow and even after 15 min. it’s still not finished, so I’m always closing it and not sending any report.
Lately, I moticed a strange bug (still on 6.0.2, so maybe it’s fixed by now) where Plasmashell was ALWAYS crashing when launching a video on Spotify. I would sent that crash report if not the debug downloading issue.
Also, if I download some debug codes, why the next time the system needs to download them again? This makes me question if they were downloaded in the first place. Is it even working in Arch systems?
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Nate, now there is a new post soon to come – and so i’m not spamming “that much” – i stumbled with this recently:
https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2019/02/14/packagekit-is-dead-long-live-well-something-else/
it’s 5 years old, but it basically says PackageKit is dead and we all need to “move on”… however i’ve also read Discover uses it for most of it’s job…
Does post this still apply and is it a concern to Discover?
thanks
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PackageKit is fine; it’s been more or less taken over by Matthias Klumpp and is still actively developed. That blog post was needlessly alarmist even at the time and can safely be ignored today. Unfortunately on the internet everything is forever!
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Thanks for clarifying that. I came to Linux way before it, i remember when it came out and the huge step forward it was back in the day…
So i became somewhat concerned if we were all going backward to each distro having it’s own thing!!!
i’m glad it’s being taken care of and evolving 🙂
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Well that’s kind of happening too unfortunately. Because now that immutable distros are all the rage, they don’t work with PackageKit and each one has its own special snowflake method of updating the system. So today Discover has dedicated backends for SteamOS and Kinoite–both immutable distros built with different underlying tech.
In a way it’s nice for them that they get custom Discover backends that don’t have to be limited by the lowest common denominator the way PackageKit is, but it’s still more maintenance, and I worry about what happens when those Discover backends’ current maintainers switch jobs, switch projects, burn out, etc.
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Yap… immutable is starting to be everywhere… seems to be the future!
Would be nice if each distro would have a dedicated developer to support Discover’s development of “their own” backends…
(how knows… maybe that Plasma rant on Fedora gets something good out of it, at least)
Burn outs are a PITA these days. We’ve already crossed paths with 3 devs in a project that simply burned. Everytime they get replaced we have to inform the new ones of all the “specificities” of our software implementation…
It’s not their fault, naturally! It’s too much work, too much pressure , too much of everything the “world” requires today…
While i’m sometimes sad i didn’t evolve more in programming (because i did loved it), this makes me think that maybe it was for the better. It’s a “mad” job!!!
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Looking forward for libeis stuff in kwin for RemoteDesktop portal so sharing mouse and keyboard to different device will work in software kvm like input leap.
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