This week in KDE: all about those apps

This Week in KDE 4 Minutes

A few weeks ago, some of us discovered that KDE apps just looked terrible when run in GNOME. A lengthy discussion on icon theming ensued, with various improvements made on both sides. The KDE effort was spearheaded by Christoph Cullmann, as already described in his post on the subject. In a nutshell, KDE apps opting into the new system that are run outside of Plasma will always have the Breeze style and icons available, unless overridden by the system or the user. Apps opting in so far include Kate, Konsole, and Dolphin. Feel free to help opt more apps in by using those commits as inspiration!

Dolphin itself also received a lot of special attention this week, in addition to other cool stuff:

New Features

Dolphin now gives you the option to enable previews for folders on remote locations. Be aware that this can cause slowdowns, and the UI tells you that, too (Sergey Katunin, Dolphin 24.08. Link):

Discover now handles the case where one of your Flatpak apps has been marked as “end of life” and replaced with another one; it gives you the opportunity to switch to the new one, or cancel and keep using the old one anyway (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.1. Link):

Eagle-eyed readers have noticed this isn’t using the new dialog style. It hasn’t been ported yet. There are a lot of instances like this where Kirigami.OverlaySheet is inappropriately used as a confirmation dialog that need porting.

UI Improvements

Dolphin’s ability to let you change things as root when kio-admin is installed has received a big upgrade: now it shows you a warning telling you what bad things you can do if you’re not careful, and also keeps a banner visible while you’re in root mode (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 24.08. Link):

Dolphin has received a number of UI improvements and better handling for viewing read-only folders (Jin Liu, Dolphin 24.08. Link)

Switched Spectacle over to using the common style for immutable toolview tabs in Kirigami apps (me: Nate Graham, Spectacle 24.08. Link):

KMenuEdit no longer annoyingly prompts you for confirmation when you delete a group (Kenny Hui, Plasma 6.1. Link)

The icons shown in our dialogs no longer themselves depict dialogs for mega dialog-ception; now they’re just normal colored icons (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.3. Link):

Bug Fixes

Attempting to open multiple “New Folder” dialogs on a slow network location no longer causes Dolphin to crash (Akseli Lahtinen, Dolphin 24.08. Link)

Very small SVG images are now displayed properly in thumbnail previews (Méven Car, kio-extras 24.08. Link)

Fixed a case where our authentication system could crash and leave apps unable to request authentication (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Turning on HDR mode no longer makes the screen colors wrong when using Night Color (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Screens using fractional scale factors no longer get a weird row of pixels on the bottom edge that are held to the color of previously opened windows (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Fixed several Plasma crashes that were introduced by porting some custom drag-and-drop code to the upstream Qt thing, but turns out to not be suitable for our purposes. Reverting to our custom code fixes the crashes (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.1, Link 1 and link 2)

When Chromium-based browsers are running in native Wayland mode, dragging and dropping files into websites no longer makes them freeze and crash. This was a complicated bug largely caused by Chromium doing something unusual, but KWin now handles it properly (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Visiting System Settings’ File Search page no longer sometimes causes a long hang when the file indexer is under heavy load (Janet Blackquill, Frameworks 6.3. Link)

If for some reason you want to use the Kickoff application launcher to search for a single character, close Kickoff, and then do the same thing again, the second search will now show results as expected (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 6.3. Link)

KSvg items and Kirigami.Icon used in Plasma now re-color re-colorable SVG images in the expected way when they’re displayed in Plasma irrespective of color scheme. This makes the CatWalk cat look correct while using a mixed light/dark global theme like Breeze Twilight (Marco Martin, Frameworks 6.3. Link):

Other bug information of note:

…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

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and labor have helped to bring it there! But as we grow, it’s going to be equally important that this stream of labor be made sustainable, which primarily means paying for it. Right now the vast majority of KDE runs on labor not paid for by KDE e.V. (the nonprofit foundation behind KDE, of which I am a board member), and that’s a problem. We’ve taken steps to change this with paid technical contractors—but those steps are small due to growing but still limited financial resources. If you’d like to help change that, consider donating today!

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

29 thoughts on “This week in KDE: all about those apps”

  1. Many times when I need to salvage/destroy something on windows I just boot into a live Linux Mint that has this function very conveniently baked into the context menu, clearly saying: open as root. This here KDE way is not intuitive att all and also needs something to be installed for it to even work. As a linux noob I even recall using Mint from a usb stick to replace a svg file on a KDE Neon install because that whole task via terminal was simply beyond comprehension to me. Still is btw… Open as root should be an option even if it is dangerous and can destroy worlds and obliterate the universe. The banner is a clear “from now on this is all your fault” indicator. The average new linux user won’t click on “Open as root” since that tells them: I am not a plant, so why would I. Still, glad to see there now is this option in KDE, kinda.

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    1. I second that. This is a feature that simply should be there!
      So many times i cannot move or delete something from my windows partition or a NTFS USB drive!
      This was even embarrassing at work where my colleagues came with a USB drive and they wanted some files from me. I had to open the terminal for copy paste! In 2024! How can I recommend Linux where I had to explain that I need to open the terminal for simple copy/paste operations in 2024?!?
      Linux should be GUI only for long time🤔
      /rant off ☺️
      Btw, thanks you Devs for all your work.
      I cannot image going to Windows 11 as my primary OS now. From time to time I dual boot to use some windows only software and I’m amazed how good Linux is compared to it

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    2. kio-admin has existed for a long while and is part of KDE’s packaging recommendations for distros, though the discoverability was essentially non-existent until this week’s changes. Dolphin aside, Krusader, KDE’s other file manager, has long had an option for root mode built-in. So no, you don’t need terminal to perform root operations in 2024, but it is true that Dolphin’s implementation of this was lacking until they finally added a proper toggle this week.

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    3. The best and safest way would be to add “Open as root” into the context menu options but leave it unchecked by default. To me the “View” menu is not where I would expect to find the option for such a crucial action. You could even name it “Open as administrator” like it is on Windows. “Root” just confuses people and creates another nightmare for translators.

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    4. So basically you just want it to behave exactly the same as on Windows? I hope not. It belongs in view because it’s letting you view folders as root. The fact that you describe this as a crucial action is scary to me. This feature should be used as little as humanly possible, ideally never. It definitely should not be featured somewhere as prominent as the context menu by default as that would just be encouraging bad practice.

      Root is and always has been standard Unix terminology. There is a standard translation of the term for just about every language already. This is a non-issue. Root is the term used in all documentation and tutorials for Linux and other Unixes including macOS, which isn’t exactly niche. Sticking with existing widely used terminology is significantly less confusing than having KDE one-sidedly copy Windows terminology and deviate from the entire rest of the Unix ecosystem. That said, seems like the KDE people agree with you on that one, since all of the screenshots say admin instead of root. Shame.

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    5. @poudink

      In Windows you still have to take ownership of system files to gain access, the contextmenu “Run as administrator” is not the same as root priviledges. Since KDE is all about getting new users and not gatekeeping, I thought a simple use of another word could be beneficial. Apparently not, said the linux gestapo. What I was TRYING to say with the word “crucial” was more in the lines of “important” or “major”, since English is not my first language apparently that didn’t go down too well with you either. I will also say that the fact KDE has two file managers makes zero sense and even worse that you assume users know this and also know that there’s a big difference between them. Yeah, let’s not put a little entry in the context menu for root actions to help dumb people do dumb things, because you said so. You must be mad as Hell at Linux Mint 24/7 then? Your translation assumptions are hysterical too. Try and translate open as root in Finnish, using your standardized universal word “root” and tell me how that went. No wonder the year of the linux desktop is still something like 60-70 years away when people get hung up on the smallest details. The best linux solution for this CRUCIAL problem is probably to fork Fedora KDE and add it to the context menu and release the whole thing as Fedora KDE Plasma 6 Root Edition.

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    6. Windows allowed (and probably still allows, although the last one I used was 7) you to basically wreck it without leaving the GUI for years and despite that is was and still is commonly considered way easier to use than Linux, so there’s nod direct correlation between gatekeeping and perceived ease of use.

      Meanwhile, dealing with USB drives on desktop Linux is annoying and complicated. I’d even call it extremely unintuitive for a new user.

      (By the way, I still remember how easy it was to start a complete KDE session as root back in the days of KDE 4.x and nobody really complained about it.)

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  2. Kio-admin doesn’t work for dolphin. Try to create a folder in Dolphin in the root directory if you don’t believe me. This was enabled a few version a go and disabled again soon after.

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    1. so it does work, but not for that super specific use case. I really don’t know why you want to add folders to root, but chances are you just shouldn’t, so it might be a deliberate design decision. krusader probably still lets you do it tho, so whatever

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  3. @poudink I don’t want to add files to root, but I would like the option if necessary. However, the main issue isn’t about adding files to root, which is a niche use case. It’s about managing files on USB devices or Windows partitions, which is an everyday scenario. Unfortunately, this often requires root access for some reason.

    Sometimes, it feels like KDE developers might not fully understand the experiences of Windows users or those who dual boot. For us, managing these tasks can frequently be quite challenging.

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    1. Works for me in 5.27 (didn’t update to 6 yet), so it’s a regression and should be reported on the bugtracker if it wasn’t already. I don’t get why creating directories would be where you draw the line.

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    2. The part about needing root for something as simple as copying files over seems like a whole another issue too. udisks is supposed to solve this, as it mounts everything as your user, and it always works well for me. Having root as a workaround if you have an issue is a good thing, but the end goal should be an actual solution.

      What root is for sure necessary for is doing system administration tasks (eg. editing config files), which I do via the command line anyways, but I get that most people would rather do it via KWrite and Dolphin, and it’s important to provide them a solution for that.

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  4. In the vein of “Our technical descriptions should to be normie-compatible”, I would reformulate “Creating previews is very expensive over the network in terms of network resources.” in Dolphin.

    My reasoning:

    a) While I’m not a native speaker, “Being expensive on the network” = “Causing lots of network traffic” is in my mind not something I would think many normies would make the mental connection/translation. Wouls native English speakers understand this by default, regardless of their background?

    b) “very expensive” is in a warning bold font here. If you maybe don’t understand fully what is meant with “expensive” here, an unexperienced normie maybe thinks that they’ll have to pay for something later if they activate this option.

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    1. I know there is the case of metered connections, where “You will recieve a huge bill” is a possibility, but still, since I believe unmetered connections are more common, I would formulate especially the first sentence less in-your-face.

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    2. Yeah, I agree that the word “expensive” is rather jargonistic in that context. Strings are very easy to change, fortunately. Feel free to submit a merge request changing this one!

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  5. Honest curiosity question, why are virtually all QML based apps inconsistent with marging, spacing and centering elements?

    Just in your Discover screenshot the title of the dialog looks way off.

    I’ve annotated the screenshot showing the screenshot

    https://i.imgur.com/aXRXFl1.png

    Also, the dimming is leaving the window decorator out, which is weird and different from QWidgets.

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    1. I think you should make this a discussion on the bugtracker. As somebody who knows nothing about UI design, I think your input would be appreciated.

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    2. It’s an extremely complicated topic without a single simple answer.

      Everyone in KDE is aware of it, and many of us are working in some capacity to try to improve this.

      One thing I will observe though is that unfortunately you can’t measure between variable-sized UI elements like icons and text in the way you did and get a useful result. See https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/Design/Frequently_Discussed_Topics#Measuring_between_variable-size_UI_elements

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  6. Hi!

    Thank you so much for your weekly posts.

    And of course thank you, everyone, for contributing to this amazing project!

    I use Plasma Wayland for years now as my daily driver. It’s been a long and sometimes rough journey. But I think it was totally worth it, considering the pleasing current state of things as well the feeling of increasing momentum in the ecosystem!

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    1. Also wanted to add, that I am also using Kate on Windows! Its so cool to be able to use your favorite tools and a different platform.

      Thanks for making this possible and a breeze!

      But… please reconsider the thicc icons on the left. Me eyes want to scream each time I open Kate, I think they are using way to much space and are distracting. I would be much happier with an traditional sleek vertical-text-tab-bar.

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  7. I had an annoying bug with Dolphin where scrolling wouldn’t work on the Location bar, and moving files on it would crash but after this morning update, it is already fixed 🤷‍♂️ Thanks 💪

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  8. Wish there is a simple kde mail app which works properly with proper email providers and that can run in background without the need of akonadi. I tried to write one but failed.

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    1. Akonadi should just (“just”, I get that wouldn’t be easy lol) be replaced.

      It does make sense to integrate the e-mail client, contact list and calendar. They go together. But Akonadi is just hell and never worked well for me, so I just use Thunderbird.

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  10. Can we get that preview selection to be local/remote aware? I like how pretty ya’ll have made my folders now.

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  11. I’m a Cinnamon user who uses a lot of KDE apps. Due to a vision impairment, I am only able to use an app if it has a dark mode. That’s not a “preference” or a matter of aesthetics, I am unable to use apps with a white background and dark text at all.

    All the KDE apps I use are awesome, but there are unfortunately many I can’t use because there’s no way to set them to dark mode when run on a gtk desktop. I’ve opened some issues about it for individual apps, but it seems strange to me that it needs to be implemented independently on each app.

    The discussion you linked to about theming on Gnome seems like it’s about icons, not app color schemes. Will it also make it easier to use breeze dark colors on non-plasma desktops?

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