These past two weeks in KDE: fixing sticky keys and the worst crashes

These past two weeks were big for Wayland accessibility support, as Nicolas Fella did a lot of work to improve support for sticky keys to equal the state they were in on X11. This work is not complete, but so far it’s taken a big bite out of the open issues! The work lands in a mixture of Plasma 6.1.3 and 6.2.0 (link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6).

Beyond this, it’s notable that Plasma developers fixed the five most common Plasma crashes, as well as a bunch of less common ones, which you’ll see mentioned below. These were caused by a mix of Qt regressions and our own code defects. The new automatic crash reporting system has been a huge boon here, allowing us to see which crashes are actually affecting people most. So please do continue to report them!

And of course there’s lots more too. Check it out:

New Features

Elisa now offers a feature to add a track, album, etc. directly to the playlist after current song, playing it next (Jack Hill, Elisa 24.08.0. Link):

System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page now has a calibration tool (Joshua Goins, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The default width of Icons-and-Text Task Manager items is now user- configurable, and should also exhibit slightly smarter shrinking behavior as space gets filled up (Kisaragi Hiu, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Added support for Plasma’s charging threshold feature to OpenBSD (Rafael Sadowski, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

UI Improvements

Dolphin now features a lovely super premium user experience for installing Filelight if it’s not already installed (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 24.08.0. Link):

Filelight now has a more illuminating and welcoming homepage (me: Nate Graham, Filelight 24.08.0. Link):

Spectacle has now adopted the “inline messages touch the header” paradigm (me: Nate Graham, Spectacle 24.08.0. Link):

System Settings’ Night Light page now accepts creative custom times, no longer internally clamping them to a set of acceptable times (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)

Improved the smoothness of resizing Plasma widgets (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Made it impossible to remove administrator privileges from your current user unless there’s at least one other admin user on the system, to ensure that someone is an admin and can reverse the decision if needed! (Thomas Duckworth, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The “launch this app” shortcut for apps on System Settings’ Shortcuts page is now named “Launch”, making its purpose clear (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Added some relevant clipboard-related keywords to System Settings’ General Behavior page, so you can find it in a search for things like “paste” and “selection” and stuff like that (Christoph Wolk, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Plasma’s Digital Clock widget now uses a typographic space to separate the time from the date when in single-row mode, so that it looks better especially when using a monospace font (Kisaragi Hiu, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Removed the filter for different job types from Plasma’s Printers widget, because it never worked (seriously) and apparently no one ever noticed because we didn’t even have any bug reports about it! (Mike Noe, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Bug Fixes

Filelight no longer fails to initiate a second scan after leaving the first one and going back to the Overview page (Harald Sitter, Filelight 24.08.0. Link)

Fixed one of the most common ways that Plasma could crash randomly, out of the blue (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)

Fixed one of the most common ways that Plasma could crash on Wayland when a screen turns off (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)

Fixed another one of the apparently many ways that Plasma can crash while handling various types of clipboard data, which appeared to be very common (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)

Fixed a somewhat common way that Powerdevil could crash when waking the system from sleep with certain types of monitors (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)

Fixed an issue that caused Spectacle to crash after finishing a screen recording on systems using PipeWire 1.2.0 (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)

Fixed an issue that caused Plasma on Wayland to crash when dragging a Task Manager task with no .desktop file associated with it (such as a Steam game) onto the desktop (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)

Fixed a recent regression that caused System Tray icons for GTK2 apps to stop responding after the first time they’re clicked. Added an autotest to make sure this doesn’t regress again, too (David Edmundson and Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)

It’s now possible to set your user avatar image to a file those full path contains “special characters” like spaces, ampersands, etc. (Daniil-Viktor Ratkin, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)

It’s now more reliable to change the date or time using System Settings on a distro not using Systemd (Fabio Bas, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)

Plasma’s RDP server now works properly after again a prior failed connection using a non-H.264-capable client app (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)

The Fcitx input method’s “show input method info when switching input focus” setting is now compatible with Plasma’s zoom-out style edit mode, and no longer causes it to exit immediately when the input method popup is shown (Weng Xuetian, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)

Fixed a different somewhat common out-of-the-blue Plasma crash (Méven Car, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Fixed a case where KWin could crash on X11 when compositing gets toggled on or off (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Fixed a regression in Discover that caused various alerts and information items in certain apps’ description pages to not appear as expected (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Fixed a regression in Plasma 6.0 that caused the “remove this item” hover icons in KRunner’s history view to be invisible (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

OpenVPN VPNs requiring a challenge-response work again with NetworkManager 1.64 or later (Benjamin Robin, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

“Text Only” System Monitor sensors on horizontal Plasma panels are once again correctly-sized with centered text (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

“Line Chart” System Monitor sensors now show their legends as expected when placed on a wide vertical Plasma panel (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

When using Plasma’s “Raise maximum volume” setting, it now applies to the per-app volume sliders in the System Tray popup as well as the device volume sliders (Roberto Chamorro, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed the source of bizarre view corruption in Dolphin introduced in the recently-released Frameworks 6.4 (Vlad Zahorodnii, Frameworks 6.4.1. Link)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when trying to re-assign a shortcut for a widget to one already used by something else (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 6.5. Link)

On the “Get New [thing]” dialogs, downloading one file from an entry that includes many now works from the details page (Akseli Lahtinen, Frameworks 6.5. Link)

Fixed another fairly common way that Plasma could crash on Wayland when a screen turns off (David Edmundson, Qt 6.7.3. Link)

Fixed yet another common way that Plasma could crash on Wayland, this time when showing notifications (David Edmundson, Qt 6.7.3. Link)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when you trigger the Meta+V keyboard shortcut to open the clipboard history menu over and over again in rapid succession (Vlad Zahorodnii, Qt 6.7.3. Link)

Fixed a case where trying to save a file in a Flatpak or Snap app using the standard Save dialog could fail and cause the saving app to quit instead! (Nicolas Fella, Qt 6.7.3. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 2 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 3 two weeks ago). Current list of bugs
• 31 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as two weeks ago). Current list of bugs
• 185 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last two weeks. Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Receiving a Plasma notification no longer blocks KWin’s “direct scan-out” feature, e.g. while playing a game, so it should no longer briefly reduce performance (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)

Improved KWin’s detection for whether triple buffering on Wayland will improve things so that it won’t occasionally turn on and off repeatedly, impairing performance (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)

Plasma’s RDP server is now capable of listening for IPv6 connections (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.1.3. Link)

KWin now disables 10 bits-per-color (BPC) support for monitors plugged into a dock, as these often limit the signal to 8 BPC but don’t tell KWin, causing issues when KWin tries to enable 10 BPC mode because it thinks it should be possible (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

KWin now operates with “realtime” capabilities on systems using musl instead of glibc (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Plasma’s RDP server now also works as expected on systems using the OpenH264 video codec (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Relevant only for cutting-edge distro-builders: It’s now possible to compile KWin with support for only the Wayland session, so support for X11 apps would be provided exclusively through XWayland (Neal Gompa, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Improved performance for everything in KDE that uses KFileItem::isHidden (Volker Krause, Frameworks 6.5. Link)

Created a new WindowStateSaver QML object you can add to apps’ windows to make them remember their size, maximization state (and position, on X11) (Joshua Goins, Frameworks 6.5. Link)

Apps storing their transient state data separately from their persistent configuration data now do so by putting the state config file in the standard XDG state folder of ~/.local/state/ (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 6.5. Link)

Automation & Systematization

Added an autotest to test clearing the clipboard history (Fushan Wen, 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

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!