This week in KDE: Discover and more

It was a big week for Discover, which received multiple UI improvements, performance enhancements, and bug fixes that you’ll find mentioned throughout the text!

There are more features and UI improvements to other components as well, plus a bunch of juicy bug fixes. I’m feeling like we’ve turned the corner on those bugs. No really significant Plasma bugs have been reported in the past week or two, just little ones that are easily squashed. Plasma is really feeling solid these days!

Notable New Features

You can now re-bind the buttons on drawing tablet pens to mouse clicks if you’d like, in addition to the existing feature to bind them to keyboard shortcuts. And the user interface for this is now much better and clearer (Joshua Goins, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

There’s now an on-by-default sound that plays when you connect or disconnect a screen, to help you figure out whether it was connected successfully — just like we already do for USB devices (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma’s Task Manager textual-list-style group popup now scales properly (Christoph Wolk, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Plasma’s Battery Monitor widget once again stays visible while plugged in and charging but not fully charged yet (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Landed a minor redesign of Discover’s app page to better conform to the HIG, including the following changes:

• Better and more consistent margins and padding
• Better and more compact display of the content rating information
• Use underlined links rather than buttons for opening web URLs
• Replace internal separator lines with whitespace
• Move display of distro-packaged apps’ permissions to the bottom

(me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4):

The menu of clipboard items that appears when you press Meta+V now shares its UI with the Plasma Clipboard widget, offering maintenance benefits, a more consistent UI, and better visualization for long text and images (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

In Welcome Center, the pages introducing Overview and Plasma Vaults now have beautiful, rich graphics depicting the features themselves, and like all the others, they respect your system’s active theme settings, too (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2):

The frequency with which Discover’s notifier System Tray icon appears now respects the “Notification frequency” setting that you can choose in System Settings, matching the frequency with which system notifications about updates appear (Thomas Duckworth, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

When you tile a Breeze-themed window to the left or right screen edge, the window’s top-most pixels no longer allow the window to be resized by dragging, breaking Fitts’ Law for those pixels (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Plasma’s Activities widget now scales properly and no longer grows too large with a really thick panel (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2)

System Settings’ Night Light page now prevents you from setting manual timings that cause the start and stop transitions to overlap, and shows this visually, too (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Made the menu button on System Settings’ Autostart page conform to the HIG (Christoph Wolk, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Made the list-remove Breeze icon look like a red X, same as edit-delete-remove. This helps to standardize on the red X symbolism for “remove this abstract thing” that the HIG recommends (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 6.5. Link):

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed a somewhat common way that Powerdevil could crash after the system went to sleep due to inactivity (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

When Flatpak/sandboxed/portal-using apps request inhibiting sleep, it now actually works! (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

When you move a Plasma panel to another screen edge, its widgets no longer inappropriately become interactive until you leave Edit Mode (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

Fixed two issues with Plasma’s “Centered” and “Scaled and cropped” wallpaper positioning modes that caused images of certain sizes to be displayed incorrectly with certain screen scales (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1.4. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed three Plasma 6 porting regressions in Folder View that caused the widget representation to lose its custom title feature, caused existing labels to remain visible while renaming, and made it impossible to select other items with the keyboard after renaming something (Marco Martin and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1.4. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

Discover no longer cuts off the first letter of the name of non-SPDX-compatible licenses when it displays them on the app page (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

When Alt+Tabbing through windows, tab keystrokes no longer leak into XWayland-using apps when using default XWayland app keyboard snooping setting (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Maximized XWayland-using apps no longer leave pixel gaps on the side of the screen with certain fractional scale factors (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a Qt bug that caused many Plasma crashes while performing a variety of everyday activities with multiple screens are connected (David Edmundson, Qt 6.7.4 and 6.8.0. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 2 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 31 15-minute Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 130 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week. Full list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Made the icon loading code in Discover non-blocking, which speeds up launch time and improves scrolling smoothness (Harald Sitter, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The “Ring system bell when modifier keys are used” and “Ring system bell when locking keys are toggled” Sticky Keys features are now implemented on Wayland. This completes the project to gain full Sticky Keys support! (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1, link 2, and link 3)

KWin no longer chooses an inappropriate default scale factor for really wacky screens that mis-report their physical dimensions badly enough that they say they’re between zero and three millimeters wide or tall (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

On Wayland, apps that intentionally suppress cursor launch feedback now have more correct activation behaviors (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.5. Link)

Notable in Automation & Systematization

Added an “All bugs reported by me” link to the homepage on https://bugs.kde.org, so now you can truly see all of your bug reports, not just the open ones (me: Nate Graham, link)

Shortened the messages sent by the bug janitor warning that bugs will be auto-closed soon (Oliver Beard, link)

Adjusted the new bug template to be more accurate about how you fill in version numbers, including recommending using the kinfo command-line tool (me: Nate Graham, 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!