New Features
You can now turn on the “autoscrolling” feature of the Libinput driver, which lets you scroll on any scrollable view by holding down the middle button of your mouse and moving the whole mouse (Evgeniy Chesnokov, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
UI Improvements
When zooming into or out of a document in Okular using Ctrl+Scroll, it now zooms into or out of the actual cursor position, not the center of the page (Alexis Murzeau, Okular 24.08.0. Link)
Okular now scales radio buttons and checkboxes to the size of the form fields they inhabit, which looks better for forms that have huge or tiny versions of these (Pratham Gandhi, Okular 24.08.0. Link)
Dolphin now supports the systemwide “disable smooth scrolling” setting (Nathan Misner, Dolphin 24.08.0 Link)
Opening and closing Elisa’s playlist panel is no longer somewhat choppy (Jack Hill, Elisa 24.08. Link)
When quick-tiling two adjacent windows and resizing one, the other will resize too. The location of the split between them is now reset to its default position after all adjacent quick-tiled windows are closed or un-tiled (Erwin Saumweber, Plasma 6.1.2. Link)
.Desktop files in sub-folders below your desktop are now shown as they are on the desktop itself (Alexander Wilms, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
On System Settings’ Accessibility page, the Open dialog for choosing custom bell sounds now accepts .oga files, and also tells you what types of files it supports (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
On System Settings Desktop Effects page, “internal” effects are no longer listed at all (even in a hidden-by-default state), which makes it more difficult for people to break their systems by accident, and also fixes an odd interaction whereby clicking the “Defaults” button would reset the default settings of internal effects changed elsewhere. You can still see the internal effects in KWin’s debug console window if needed (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Made a bunch of small changes to System Settings pages to align them better with the new human interface guidelines (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)
Improved the legibility of the text in Kirigami.NavigationTabBar buttons, especially on low or medium DPI screens (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.4. Link)
Bug Fixes
Fixed a recent regression that caused the Powerdevil power management daemon to sometimes crash randomly when the system has any monitors connected that support DDC-based brightness control (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.1.2. Link)
On the System Settings’ recently re-done Keyboard page, table columns in the layout table are once again resizable, and also have more sensible default widths now (Wind He, Plasma 6.1.2. Link)
Fixed one source of the recent issue with certain System Settings pages being sometimes broken when opened — this one being the issue where opening the Touchpad or Networks pages would break other ones opened afterwards. We’re still investigating the other issues, which frankly make no sense and shouldn’t be happening. Some of them may be Qt regressions. Investigation is ongoing (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)
Icons in the new Edit Mode’s toolbar buttons are no longer slightly blurry (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)
KWin’s “open new windows under pointer” feature now actually does, and ignores the active screen when that screen differs from the screen with the pointer on it (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)
Fixed multiple recent regressions and longstanding issues with System Monitor widgets displayed on panels (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.2.0):
- Text in small pie charts overflowing onto the next line awkwardly (link)
- Adjacent pie charts overlapping at certain panel thicknesses (link)
- Graphs not taking enough space on a thick panel (link)
With wide color gamut turned on or an ICC color profile in use, transparent windows are no longer too transparent (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Showing and hiding titlebars and frames on a scaled display no longer causes XWayland windows to move diagonally by about 1px every time (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)
Fixed multiple issues and glitches affecting floating panels via a significant code refactor (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)
Fixed a recent Qt regression that caused Plasma to sometimes crash when screens were disconnected (David Edmundson, Qt 6.7.3. Link 1 and link 2)
Fixed a Qt regression that caused web pages rendered by QtWebEngine (most notably in KMail’s HTML message viewer window) to display have blocky, blurry, or pixelated text and graphics (David Edmundson, Qt 6.8.0. Link)
Other bug information of note:
- 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
- 31 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 29 last week). Current list of bugs
- 98 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week. Full list of bugs
Performance & Technical
Made the pam_kwallet library able to build with libgcrypt 1.11, restoring its ability to let the system wallet unlock automatically on login again (Daniel Exner, Plasma 6.1.2. Link)
Automation & Systematization
Added some UI tests to KCalc, ensuring that the recent prominent regression in functionality can’t happen again (Gabriel Barrantes, 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
As I mentioned last week, if you use have multiple systems or an adventurous personality, you can really help us out by installing beta versions of Plasma using your distro’s available repos and reporting bugs. Arch, Fedora, and openSUSE Tumbleweed are examples of great distros for this purpose. So please please do try out Plasma beta versions. It truly does help us! Heck, if you’re very adventurous, live on the nightly repos. I’ve been doing this full-time for 5 years with my sole computer and it’s surprisingly stable.
Does that sound too scary? Consider donating today instead! That helps too.
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!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
I’ve to admit that I’ve never understood what the “autoscrolling” option mean (like displayed in Firefox settings) for all theses years. (Maybe “Enable scrolling with middle-click” would be clearer.)
So I’ve tested it in Firefox (even with a touchpad), when middle-clicking, it shows a special cursor, and the more I moved the cursor from the original click position, the faster the scrolling (in this direction), so it can be used easely to scroll very long pages. The recent implementation in Plasma seems to sync the scrolling with the cursor move, which is certainly more precise, but won’t allow scrolling long page without lifting the mouse many times.
Since I don’t use this feature (even now I know what it means in Firefox), I cannot pronounce myself if the behaviour in Plasma would be inconvenient for the ones used to Firefox-like behaviour.
For the rest, I’m reading This Week in KDE every week and I’m always grateful (even more and more) for the very good work, and patiently wait for Manjaro to get up to date. So a warmful thank you for all the KDE team.
LikeLiked by 2 people
“I’ve to admit that I’ve never understood what the “autoscrolling” option mean (like displayed in Firefox settings) for all theses years.”
Me either!!! I always disabled it cause I thought of something like the page automatically going down (when reading lyrics or playing guitar tabs, for example, you want the page to go down on its own because your hands are busy elsewhere). But I never got the point of that outside of these specific scenarios.
LikeLike
Me too! I turned it on, then off, saw no difference. I suspected it may not work, but since I had no idea how to triger it, I just started ignoring it, but was always curious, how it would work. The name “autoscrolling” is defenitely missleading.
LikeLike
I haven’t gotten around to filing an issue for this yet, but is the custom accent color eyedrop selector only supposed to work in Wayland? On my Tumbleweed machines here it doesn’t work in X11, but does in Wayland. On 6.1.2.
LikeLike
Can I ask a question regarding Dolphin here?
For some time up until Dolphin 24.05 landed, the default selection mode in the Details view in Dolphin was such that when you clicked anywhere to the left of some file, it selected the file in the respective line. If you then dragged the mouse pointer, it would select all the lines the selection intersected.
In Dolphin 24.05 this was changed such that clicking to the left of a file doesn’t select anything, which is very unfortunate for me.
Is there any way to go back to the old behavior?
Thanks!
LikeLike
Maybe the option was just moved. I see it in Configure Dolphin -> View -> Details tab -> By clicking anywhere on the row
LikeLike
Yes! This will be a huge time saver, especially on touchpads. I’ve been using it all the time in Firefox, I am glad it came to the entire desktop env as well.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi!
I misunderstood this would be a feature for the mouse. On a trackpad, it would surely also make KDE usage for laptops much more convenient. I just wanted to verify that the current “three-finger-gesture” for swiping between virtual desktops won’t be affected/would still be available as I’m using this a lot to switch between editor, konsole and documentation.
DId I miss it in the description? Would that still work?
Thanks!
PS: Seems like the naming in the patch is not “autoscrolling”, which I also find strangely named, but “On-Button-Scrolling”. (Also not really clear, but better 😉 )
LikeLike
Hey, I left this comment on the KDE forums, but I’m not sure anyone will see it there, so I’ll post it here as well:
“I really love this feature! It feels so smooth and intuitive, it puts the normal autoscroll to shame! I do think it should have a name that describes it better though – how about Pan-Scrolling? Since it’s closer to panning with the MMB.
However, it does have its caveats. It doesn’t act nicely with some windows and games where middle-click is necessary. I tested it in Hammerwatch 2, where I had a skill bound to middle mouse and couldn’t use it – instead it sent scroll up/down, MB4 and MB5 (back and forward) key presses. Not sure if it’s intended, however, it did work wonderfully in the menus of that same game.
So I have a question – is it possible to disable it on a per-application or per-window basis? I did try to tweak some settings on the game window like ignoring global shortcuts, but that didn’t prevent me from pan-scrolling, only disabled my alt-tab (which is far from ideal).
If it’s not possible, I’d make it a priority to have an option to disable it for specific windows.”
LikeLike