This week in KDE: SVG Breeze cursors and more thumbnails

This Week in Plasma 3 Minutes

First up is something cool: support for SVG-based cursor themes! This allows compatible themes to always display beautiful sharp cursors at any size, and has already been rolled out for the Breeze Light and Breeze Dark cursor themes. It does not use the Hyprcursor system, and we have not yet upstreamed it to be a different cross-desktop spec. However, we are considering doing so in the near future. This work was done by Jin Liu and Vlad Zahorodnii, and lands in Plasma 6.2.0.

On the subject of cross-desktop specs, KDE apps now does support the cross-desktop thumbnailer spec, meaning that any of these thumbnailers already on the system will now instantly start working! One of the most notable examples would be the STL file thumbnailer, which will be a boon for anyone working with 3D models or 3D printers. This work was done by Akseli Lahtinen and lands in KDE Frameworks 6.6. You can read about it more in this blog post.

That isn’t all, though…

More Notable New Features

Elisa now shows the total duration of the songs from the playlist in its footer (Karl Hoffman, Elisa 24.12.0. Link):

Plasma now lets you escape from the tyranny of time by hiding the clocks on the login and lock screens entirely (Someone going by the pseudonym “Be Ing”, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Plasma’s Pager widget now lets you turn off window outlines if you’d prefer a cleaner display of only the virtual desktops (Christian Muehlhaeuser, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The Breeze Light and Breeze Dark Plasma styles (not color schemes, Plasma styles) now respect your systemwide accent color too. In particular, this makes the built-in Breeze Twilight Global Theme fully accent-color-aware (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

Notable UI Improvements

Elisa now remembers window maximization state and prior window geometry across launches as expected (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 24.08.0. Link)

Filelight now remembers its window size (and position, on X11) across launches (me: Nate Graham, Filelight, 24.12.0. Link)

When using background blur e.g. in apps like Konsole, there’s no longer a blurry sharp corner poking out of the rounded titlebar corners (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed a silly bug that caused System Settings’ Display & Monitor page to be unable to show auto-rotate settings the first time it was opened (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

When you click on column headers in System Monitor to sort a table by a different column, they’re now ordered top-to-bottom as expected (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)

Worked around a quirk in VLC, with the net result that standard MPRIS-compatible play/pause controls (e.g. via global shortcut, dedicated keyboard keys, or the Media Player widget) work again (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)

Worked around a Qt bug that caused widgets in Plasma’s Widget Explorer to overlap after clearing the search field text with animations globally disabled (me: Nate Graham and Noah Davis, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)

Fixed a bug that caused the “copy time/date to clipboard” feature of Plasma’s Digital Clock widget to not work on Wayland. This should also more generally help with clipboard issues where the source window disappears after content is copied (David Redondo, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

The “Small font” setting on System Settings’ Fonts page now works again, because we fixed a subtle Plasma 6 porting error that broke it (Marco Martin, Frameworks 6.6. Link)

Other bug information of note:

Notable in Performance & Technical

Fixed an issue that caused noticeable frame drop when using certain hybrid Intel+NVIDIA GPU setups (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1.4. Link)

You can now drag-and-drop stuff to an Plasma panel in auto-hide mode on Wayland; it un-hides as needed, just like it does on X11 (Yifan Zhu, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)

Changing the language on System Settings Region & Language page is now more reliable, accounting for cases where distros might not set things up quite right themselves (Han Young, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)

Improved the speed and performance of Discover’s search feature (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)

Improved system performance when using ICC color profiles (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Video players are now more likely to be to able to trigger KWin’s direct scan-out feature, saving power and system resources (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Made Plasma’s Global Menu feature work more reliably on Wayland with exported menus from Electron apps like VSCode (David Redondo, Plasma 6.2.0. 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

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! Or consider donating instead! That helps too.

Unknown's avatar

Published by Nate

Published

23 thoughts on “This week in KDE: SVG Breeze cursors and more thumbnails”

  3. thanks for good update

    Im not sure if am allowed to ask for feature here but here it is

    auto dark mode similar to night light settings

    really hope to see it in 6.2 😀

    Like

    Reply

  4. would nice if the Animated (rotating) icons and the Popup-Folder-display in the the org.kde.plasma.folder icons also as single icons and not in a single svg-picture like action-overlays.svg
    it should be in applets as
    plus-ov.svg, minus-ov.svg and up-ov.svg

    and plus-ov-mo.svg, minus-ov-mo.svg and up-ov-mo.svg and as pressed : plus-ov-pr.svg, minus-ov-pr.svg and up-ov-pr.svg .

    the Plus, minus and up “-ov”erlay

    This can also used for other programms and stay then in the theme-look.

    The busywidget.svg, why is not overtaked the process-working.svg for it and why is
    the “busywidget.svg” not directly in (“/scaled”)/animations and accessible to matching the desktop theme for make it fit as a common styled theme..

    no it is in
    /usr/share/plasma/desktoptheme/air/widgets/
    /usr/share/plasma/desktoptheme/oxygen/widgets/
    and
    /usr/share/plasma/desktoptheme/Arc-Color/widgets/

    in an own widgets-folder instead in a icontheme-folder,
    but be icons and belongs into the iconfolder for give the possible for theming too !

    you are should enrich that.. something should be in the Icontheme folders.

    for make fit to the icontheme..

    by the way, i be at moment at my 2nd SVG-Icontheme, the First is the Blue one
    and i have manny Icons rebuilded in also the Folders, bo, bilded by me, also the File icons..
    And the 2nd Icontheme is fully translate from png to SVG, so also builded the icons by me..
    The Design is clear, builded by an other and not by me, but the icons/pictures in svg builded by me,
    because also there in germany then is legitim to build and use ..

    Because i have at moment not public the one Blue Theme is, i want push up both icons themes by the same time to have both icontheme same so far .. and as a single old Man to work with more as 3000 Icons is really hard..

    best
    Blacky

    Like

    Reply

  5. Hello,

    When playing videos in Chrome browser, KDE Plasma panel does not show videos played in small windows (Window Thumbnails). This is not the case in Firefox.

    I think this problem is caused by Media Player. Trying to remove this add-on disrupts the system stability.

    Also, when I open Chrome browser as Secret Window, it shows in Window Thumbnails without any problem.

    s there a solution?

    Note: I opened a topic about this in the KDE forum, but no one was interested;

    https://discuss.kde.org/t/kde-plasma-pencere-kucuk-resimler-window-thumbnails/19666/4

    Like

    Reply

  6. Props to Akseli for the work on the thumbnailer.

    Support for cross-desktop specs (where they are up to snuff) is a massive win and a ‘force multiplier.’

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  7. “94 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last two weeks.”

    Forgot to change the template back to “last week”. I noticed this error last week as well, when it was only one instead of two weeks.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  8. Oh, the custom thumbnailer support is a very pleasant surprise. Just recently I wondered how to add custom thumbnailers to Dolphin and why /usr/share/thumbnailers doesn’t work.

    Huge thanks to Akseli Lahtinen!

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  9. Thank you very much for the VLC – MPRIS workaround! This issue was very annoying, expecially when using KDE Connect as remote control for VLC.

    Like

    Reply

  10. Brief suggestion is to have Skanpage pre-installed / default with KDE.

    This since searching in Discover for “scanner”, it is maybe 15 rows down. New users will not figure out Skanpage is the preferred software, and install something less compatible.

    Like

    Reply

    1. KDE doesn’t get to determine what’s pre-installed alongside Plasma; distros do that. The only way we could force this is if we marked it as a mandatory dependency for Plasma, which definitely does not make technical sense.

      The issue of KDE apps not appearing first in Discover’s search results is complicated. While we could artificially prioritize our own software, should we? What if other apps have higher ratings or match the search terms better? We currently try not to “put out thumb on the scale” here, so to speak.

      Theoretically we could add a “prefer KDE apps” checkbox or something that people who do want to see KDE apps prioritized could use.

      Liked by 1 person

  12. Removable media support state for Plasma 6.1.4/KF 6.5/Applications 24.05: Garbage.

    Audio CDs not working in most players (Kaffeine, Dragon Player, Amarok), multiple crashes across when working with optical discs in almost every program. Floppies are absolutely non-functional. MTP is somewhat functional, but you better not speak aloud when copying files.

    I know that removable is barely used these days, but please make a habit of doing some testing of those. The competing environments are holding much better.

    I’ve reported some of the issues into bugzilla.

    Like

    Reply

    1. I do regularly use removable USB hard drives and flash drives and run periodic QA on those. I actually don’t own an optical drive so I can’t QA it. This is one of those “someone who uses the hardware needs to care about it” situations.

      MTP support has always been a bit spotty; it’s kind of the same situation there.

      Floppies are totally obsolete; there’s no practical reason for anyone to use them in 2024.

      Like

    2. It sounds like some KDE devs are in need of a USB CD/DVD drive. They’re cheap online and Facebook Marketplace, but if that’s all it takes, then let’s find out which devs would be willing to investigate the audio CD issue if they were donated a drive.

      Like

    3. I think the issue is more about having a use case for the hardware. If someone donated me an optical drive (which is ridiculous; I can afford one myself!) I still wouldn’t use it because I just don’t have any use cases for optical media anymore. Which means I’d have to go out of my way to care about them and do artificial QA on them, rather than real-world testing. So KDE might get more than no optical media QA from me, but I can’t say that it would be that much, or that good.

      I totally get that optical media is valid and important for some people; you guys are absolutely right about that. But I think some of those people are going to need to be the ones who to take the lead here. Same as how you can’t ask people without NVIDIA GPUs to improve the experience for those who do have NVIDIA GPUs. The diversity of hardware and means that the people with relevant hardware need to also be the technical contributors there.

      Liked by 1 person

    4. Okay, I hear what you’re saying and it sounds like we’d have to petition developers who have an interest in using optical media. Maybe the Amarok developers? We’ll find someone.

      Floppies are totally obsolete; there’s no practical reason for anyone to use them in 2024.

      Just wanted to follow up on this comment… I appreciate the measure of discernment being about practicality. Though I do have to add that using my Linux machine as a helper in the realm of retrocomputing is arguably not practical, but it is important. So there is a use case for it.

      In the same way, I’m happy to see that the Plasma screen locker now can be used as a screen saver, which is not practical but it is emotionally satisfying.

      Liked by 1 person

Leave a reply to Hasan Nişancı Cancel reply