This week in KDE: features and UI polish

Automation & Systematization, This Week in Plasma 4 Minutes

After last week’s bug-squash-a-thon, this week there was more focus on features and user interface improvements — some of them HIG-driven, as I wrote about yesterday. But we kept the bugs down too! Everything is proceeding nicely, I think.

Notable New Features

Konsole has gained a feature to automatically save all output in a terminal view to a file in real-time (Theodore Wang, Konsole 24.12.0. Link):

Distros can now customize the default set of favorite apps shared across Kickoff, Kicker, and Application Dashboard (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Info Center has a new page showing technical memory information (Thomas Duckworth, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

Notable UI Improvements

When KWin is asked to open a window whose minimum height is still taller than the screen, it no longer places it with the titlebar cut off on top, which would make it impossible to move without knowing about the Meta+drag feature. Instead, KWin will ensure the titlebar is visible and instead position the window so only content at the bottom is cut off (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Refined how KRunner matches text to System Settings pages, so it will be less aggressive about showing them to you for search text with a very weak match (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Plasma’s Digital Clock now requests “tabular numerals” just in case the active font has this feature as an optional but off-by-default thing. This ensures that all number characters are fixed-width so that the time display doesn’t jump around throughout the day (Calum Smith, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page now tells you when your tablet doesn’t support changing its orientation, so you don’t think it’s our fault (Joshua Goins, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Did a round of UI polishing for System Settings’ KWin Rules page, which also fixed a bug related to weird scrolling behavior (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The animation speed of the Plasma logout screen’s fade-to-black effect now instantly reacts to changes in the global animation speed, and the technical change to make this happen also happened to fix a performance issue with the animation as well (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Improved the accessibility of the ContextualHelpButton and KeySequenceItem library components, as well as multiple controls on System Settings’ Shortcuts page (Christoph Wolk, Frameworks 6.5 and Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

In the the Places panels visible in Dolphin, the open/save dialogs, and many other places, items now show tooltips with relevant information when hovered. This feature is enabled only when built with Qt 6.8, as 6.7 and earlier suffer from a bug that makes it not work properly (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.5. Link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Discover no longer crashes on distros built with asserts turned on (such as Neon) when run using a language where the categories have been mis-translated and overlap one another (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

After changing the current systemwide time zone in System Settings and quitting the app, it now quits properly, no longer staying secretly open in the background as a zombie and preventing you from opening it again (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Dragging screenshots and other files from Plasma notifications into Chromium-based apps (Chrome, Discord, etc) now works as expected (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Fixed a bug in the free space notifier that would cause it to flag nearly-full partitions that are read-only, such as on immutable OS style distros like Fedora Kinoite (Timothée Ravier, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Found and fixed the source of the issue that made KWin’s new triple buffering feature sometimes cause stuttering instead of the expected butter-smooth animations (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Fixed a recent regression that caused multi-row Task Manager widgets to take up too much space on Plasma panels using the “Fit to content” size mode (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Fixed an issue in KWin that caused native Wayland apps to receive incorrect information about the order in which modifier keys were pressed (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The “Click in track to scroll by one page at a time” feature — which broke in Frameworks 6.0 due to changes in Qt — now works again (Ivan Tkachenko, Frameworks 6.5. Link)

Other bug information of note:

Notable in Performance & Technical

The “Disable when two keys are held down” sticky keys feature now works on Wayland (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Discover now natively supports package installation and updating for PostmarketOS (Alexey Min and Devin Lin, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Prompted by a review from the SUSE security team, we implemented some security hardening that allows KAuth to use file descriptors rather than file paths, and implemented support for this on System Settings’ Login Screen page (Athul Raj Kollareth, Frameworks 6.5 and Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed the source of the findInCache with a lastModified timestamp of 0 is deprecated log spam, especially on immutable OS style distros like Fedora Kinoite (Timothée Ravier, Frameworks 6.5. Link)

Notable in Automation & Systematization

In Elisa, added a test for restarting the file indexer, fixed a perpetually broken test, and turned on the “tests must pass” feature to ensure that tests don’t break again in the future (Jack Hill, 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!

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Published by Nate

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29 thoughts on “This week in KDE: features and UI polish”

  1. … no longer crashes on distros built with asserts turned on (such as Neon) …

    It’s not at all obvious that Neon (Neon User? I can understand Neon Testing) will crash with “asserts”.

    Have I just missed a definition somewhere? Interested because of Bug 478854

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    1. Indeed it is not obvious. I only became aware of this recently myself. I think this is a part of the whole “Neon is for KDE enthusiasts who want to help improve the platform” angle. Which is thankfully now explicitly mentioned on Neon’s website as of about a week ago.

      Like

  2. “Distros can now customize the default set of favorite apps shared across Kickoff, Kicker, and Application Dashboard (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)”

    I’m amused to discover this isn’t a standard, not only across KDE menus, but across DEs. For example, Gnome also has favourite apps; so they are not synced with KDE’s?

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    1. The default applications for file types (and similar things like which application to open web or mailto links with) are shared through the xdg mime-apps-spec.

      Favorite applications are not shared, and this wouldn’t necessarily make sense either – a user who has installed both might want kcalc in the favorites on Plasma, but gnome-calculate on Gnome. They also do separate things if I’m not mistaken (going by searching the internet here); Favorites in Plasma are a separate list in the launcher, while on Gnome I think their idea of favorites is the equivalent of Plasma’s “Pin to task manager”.

      Liked by 1 person

  3. I’ve actually experienced the opposite of the “tall window placement loses the title bar off the top of the screen” bug – my problem is that a tall window can have its bottom underneath the task bar! That makes it hard to resize the window to bring the bottom of it into view because the bottom right resize area isn’t visible of course. I’ve done the naff thing of moving my task bar to the top of the screen, resizing tne window and moving the task bar back to the bottom again 🙂

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    1. If it may help someone: Nowadays you can move a window… keeping pressed the mouse and moving it while pressing the Meta key.

      That way you end up being able to see and reach any part of the window, even if it’s very big.

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    3. Not if the top-right corner is off-screen, which is the issue fixed by the KWin change in question.

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    4. You can also use meta+right mouse and drag to resize windows! It’s really convenient since you only have to find the right quadrant of the window instead of the right pixels to resize. I use it even when I do have access to the corners.

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  4. Good job with fixing the bugs!

    However, would it be possible to share some love with good old Oxygen? From time to time, I see Reddit posts praising the design of KDE 4 (and I agree with them). Unfortunately, Oxygen hasn’t been really touched for years now and some bugs that seriously impair its beauty have appeared.

    Having started using KDE around 4.5, I still remember those times when the cohesiveness of the whole desktop reached levels impossible today, with even GTK apps looking like they were written in Qt thanks to Oxygen-Gtk.

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    1. I don’t think the work would be blocked if anyone wanted to do it. But no one seems to want to. I think this is one of those cases where someone passionate about it would have to step up to do the work.

      Unfortunately the level of cohesiveness you remember is probably impossible today due to changes in themability for software outside of the KDE ecosystem. It’s just not as popular a thing to properly support today as it was in the past.

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    2. Unfortunately the level of cohesiveness you remember is probably impossible today due to changes in themability for software outside of the KDE ecosystem. It’s just not as popular a thing to properly support today as it was in the past.

      Yes, I guess so. Unfortunate.

       I think this is one of those cases where someone passionate about it would have to step up to do the work.

      While I could try to fix the issue of missing icons myself, just having to look how things are organized, the the very visible issue of the improper background of some newer KDE apps requires someone who knows how to program low-level Qt things. (By the way, we’ve reached the point when external Qt applications tend to look better than many KDE ones.)

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    3. The background issue is something we can and should fix, yeah. That’s not really a Qt thing but rather a missing feature in qqc2-desktop-style. Right now it lazily draws a colored rectangle for the background, rather than getting the background from the active app style.

      Liked by 1 person

    4. I didn’t even know what qqc2-desktop-style is before.

      I’ll take a look at the icons in some time. (I already “fixed” them at my machine some time ago, but that’s a rough fix unsuitable for officially distributed KDE, it should be done properly).

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  5. “Distros can now customize the default set of favorite apps shared across Kickoff, Kicker, and Application Dashboard (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)”

    That’s nice but I would also see a comeback of the subcategories in Kickoff. Without subcategories the whole menu is so messed up.

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    1. Please submit a detailed bug report that can help us reproduce and diagnose the issue.

      Also, this is something I would somewhat expect on Neon given that it’s targeted at developers and KDE enthusiasts who want to help the project by finding bugs early. If this doesn’t describe you, I would recommend a different distro.

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  7. I’m all for the additional memory information, but simply running a command and showing the output is not proper. A GUI should gather the information and present it in a GUI presentation. Dolphin is a good example. No one would want to use Dolphin if it was just the output of ls.

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    1. There are pros and cons. The pros are that we can make technical information available to people who don’t use a terminal at all at practically zero cost, with no bugs. Creating a customized page for each of these things would be thousands of times more complex with thousands of times more opportunities for bugs.

      By way of illustration, 74% of all open bug reports for Info Center are about a single custom page (Energy).

      I truly wish we had the resources to do this, but at the moment, we definitely do not. Thus, doing it anyway would result in fewer pages and more bugs, in exchange for a better, more custom display of information on each page.

      Is this worth it? Evidently the Info Center maintainers thought it wasn’t.

      Liked by 2 people

    2. This is now common practice in KInfoCenter with quite a lot of the pages. It makes everything significantly more maintainable and leverages simple built in tools that are already on the system that provide information, rather than many LoC to abstract over libraries that may not even exist.

      I have just updated that KCM anyway to make it use a different method of displaying memory info, so it should be somewhat better now.

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  8. Hey Nate! For the love of god please migrate to a new CMS, please. If you can’t do that, at least change the font to sans-serif site-wide. I did it on my end and it’s made such a BIG difference.

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    1. What’s wrong with the current CMS/style and using a serif font for paragraphs of medium-sized text in general?

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    2. I don’t see an issue with Nate’s serif font, it’s readable to me. There are plugins that can change the CSS client-side so you can enjoy any site to your preferences.

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  9. Konsole has gained a feature to automatically save all output in a terminal view to a file in real-time (Theodore Wang, Konsole 24.12.0. Link):

    That’s a 15 year old wishlist item right there, very nice.

    Info Center has a new page showing technical memory information (Thomas Duckworth, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

    Excellent! The more info in Info Center, the better.

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  10. Discover now natively supports package installation and updating for PostmarketOS (Alexey Min and Davin Lin, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

    Typo: “Devin”

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  11. Nate, just a flash idea of my cuff, but maybe you’ll like it: If the HIG-inspired changes warrant it by volume, maybe break out the improvements tagged with HIG to a (temporary?) “Notable HIG-inspired UI improvements” (or similarly named) underneath the existing “Notable UI Improvements”?

    This would put an extra reoccuring highlight on the HIGs and KDEs quest to unify all components of its desktop into a visually harmonized, well thought-out, and polished desktop.

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  12. I freaking love KDE, but i think there needs to be a bigger focus on bugfixes and polishing rather than new features

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