This week in KDE: per-monitor brightness control and “update then shut down”

This Week in Plasma 5 Minutes

This week was all about the quality of life features! As we close in on Plasma 6.2 (the soft feature freeze is in four days, eek!), some great work that’s been in progress for a long time got merged.

Notable New Features

Okular now has a “speak text from current page” feature (Athul Raj Kollareth, Okular 24.12.0. Link)

Plasma’s Brightness widget now shows individual brightness sliders for every connected monitor that supports this, so you can control them separately! If you want to adjust all of them together, you can still do that via global shortcut/keyboard key or by scrolling over the widget (Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

When there’s a pending offline system update, you’ve already got the option to update and then reboot, or just reboot and skip the update. Now, there’s also an option to complete the update and then shut down the computer! This option is exposed both on the logout screen, and also in Discover (Thomas Duckworth, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1, link 2, and link 3):

Long-pressing an empty area of a Plasma panel using a touchscreen now enters edit mode for that panel (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Notable UI Improvements

The “Add Widgets” sidebar has received a UX overhaul with numerous usability focused changes, including:

  • Appearing on the right side of the screen when opened from a right-screen-edge panel
  • Using wider grid cells to permit longer text without elision or unnatural word-wrap behaviors
  • Improved appearance of the filter button, so now it looks like it opens a drop-down menu — because it does
  • Sorting is now locale-aware, taking into account, for example, accented characters
  • You access it from buttons and menu items labeled “Add or Manage Widgets,” since it also acts as the place where you get new widgets or delete unwanted ones
  • Spacer widgets can also be found there, no longer only from the panel settings dialog
  • When installing manually-downloaded widgets, the open dialog now accept all valid file types

And believe it or not, that’s not all that’s planned! But the rest will have to wait until next week… (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1, link 2 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7)

When your system is using a non-default power profile, it’s now shown as a badge on the battery icon, so you can see both the power profile and also the battery status at the same time (Louis Moureaux and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link 1 and link 2):

At the moment this only works with the Breeze icon theme, and 3rd-party icon themes will have to add some more icons to opt into it. Until then, users of those icon themes will get the old appearance when using a non-default power profile

A panel popup opened from a widget on the end of a limited-width panel now tries its best to align its edge with that of the panel (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

Maybe I just really like clocks, ok?

You can now give a custom display name to your custom command shortcuts (Yifan Zhu and Thenujan Sandramohan, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

Discover is now more accurate about how it presents licenses, and communicates the subtle distinctions between “proprietary” and “non-free”, rather than branding everything that isn’t free software as proprietary (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.2.0. Link):

When you change keyboard layouts, the labels of the language codes that appear in the system tray no longer subtly change in size based on the shape of their letters (Sauf Lvc, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Added a Breeze icon for Applet Wallet bundle files (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 6.6. Link):

Notable Bug Fixes

When Spectacle is configured to save in a format other than PNG by default, pasting a just-copied screenshot now always works in every target app, with the caveat that some apps that don’t advertise support for non-PNG image pasting (like Firefox and Chromium, annoyingly) will get a PNG version anyway, rather than your preferred file format. This is better than it not working at all, at least! (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.08.1. Link)

You can once again use the arrow keys to move focus out of Kickoff’s favorites grid view (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)

Fixed a complex bug that could cause KWin to crash when X11 or XWayland-using apps monkeyed with the window stacking order in specific ways (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1.5. Link. And thanks to the reporter Peter Strick for being incredibly helpful in making the issue reproducible! All bug reports should be so good.)

Fixed an annoying bug that caused text copied from cells in LibreOffice Calc to never make it onto the clipboard unless you changed the clipboard’s settings to always store images (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)

Fixed a bug that caused tooltips to appear at the last location the mouse pointer was located at when interacting with the system using a stylus (David Redondo, Plasma 6.1.5. Link)

Fixed a funny bug that could make Plasma crash when you have a Media Player widget on your panel (not the System Tray, directly on a panel) and play certain specific songs whose titles are exactly the right length to trigger an obscure layout bug (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Fixed a weird issue that made modifier-only global shortcuts in the X11 session fail to switch keyboard layouts as expected while on the lock screen and other places (Yifan Zhu, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Exporting your shortcuts on System Settings’ Shortcuts page now includes any custom script shortcuts you’ve created, so that when you import them elsewhere, they work (Akseli Lahtinen and David Redondo, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Other bug information of note:

  • 2 Very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 3 as last week). Current list of bugs
  • 36 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 30 last week; bug triage activities discovered some more old issues that seemed important to fix soon, which were added to the list). Current list of bugs
  • 156 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week. Full list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Improved KWin’s HDR tone mapping, allowing it to do a better job of displaying colors in cases where HDR content specifies a brightness level higher than what the screen is capable of outputting. There’s even more that can be done, but it’s already a big improvement. (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Even further optimized the system performance impact in KWin of using an ICC profile to change your screen’s color calibration (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Improved KWin’s performance for some multi-GPU systems (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.2.0. Link)

Added a bunch of autotests for X11-specific behavior in KWin, since fewer people are exercising that code now that 80+% of Plasma 6 users are using Wayland (Vlad Zahorodnii, 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.

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40 thoughts on “This week in KDE: per-monitor brightness control and “update then shut down””

  2. Maybe remove the “Now” in “Install Updates and Shut Down Now”? The “Now” in “Shut Down Now” is: do not wait 30s. But when installing updates it will not shut down immediately. I understand that the meaning is “(Install Updates and Shut Down) Now” but might still confuse some users.

    Liked by 2 people

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    1. Personally I agree but I did it that way so it’s consistent with restart and update. I’ll look into removing it because it seems redundant to me.

      Liked by 1 person

  3. Amazing new features again ! So cool to have the ‘Install updates then shut down’ !

    I realized that despite having a RGB-keyboard, the Brightness control doesn’t show anything about keyboard backlight nor color. Does it need a specific package to work ? (I’m on Fedora 40)

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. Keyboard brightness settings depend on the UPower service providing them, which you can check with e.g. qdbus (or any other D-Bus client) at the “org.freedesktop.UPower” service on the system bus. If keyboard brightness is supported, the “GetMaxBrightness” method in its “org.freedesktop.UPower.KbdBrightness” interface will return a value greater than zero.

      This, in turn, depends on the kernel supporting backlight controls for your keyboard in the first place. On my Thinkpad, the kernel exposes this as a collection of files in /sys/class/leds/tpacpi::kbd_backlight/ which includes the max_brightness file that UPower reads. (Also includes the brightness file which it will write as a result of slider-dragging or button presses.) The device name within the leds/ directory would be different for you, but the rest of the structure should be the same.

      If the kernel supports this but UPower isn’t picking up on it, then you should file a bug with UPower. If UPower supports it but Plasma doesn’t pick up on it, please let us know through bugs.kde.org. If the kernel doesn’t support it, the device driver itself needs to be improved and that’s not necessarily straightforward, with many manufacturers prioritizing custom software for Windows over hardware documentation for everyone.

      Color settings are a similar story, only a different way of accessing the relevant device (if any suitable one exists) in /sys/class/leds/. It only works for keyboards for which the kernel exposes multicolor support: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/leds/leds-class-multicolor.html

      Liked by 2 people

    2. Thank you for the answer Jakob ! Unfortunately, I think I have a keyboard that’s not recognized by upower… /sys/classes/leds don’t have any kbd_backlight entry…

      But at least, I know now ! Thank you 🙂

      Like

  4. Upgrade & Shutdown is great option, thanks for adding that. That will come in handy. The icon on the battery for which power profile we are using is handy. Too often I see my battery draining faster than normal, and then I come to find out I had set it at performance (when plugged in to charge) and forgot to set it back when running off battery.

    I love how much care, thought, and work Niccolò Venerandi is putting into the floating panel. I am sure one day it would be a great replacement for Latte Dock (if not already).

    Liked by 1 person

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  5. I’m convinced this is the most rapidly evolving desktop ecosystem on the planet, and I mean real, useful, incremental evolution and improvement, not perpetual fad paradigm chasing.

    Impressive work this week as always.

    Liked by 3 people

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  6. I’m wondering, is the light purple accent color the new default in 6.2 or just your preference and shouldn’t the bar when opening an applet in the panel share the same color (see the 1st screenshot)? 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. That’s my personal color scheme. I have it set to pull the accent color from the wallpaper, and slightly tint all the windows with it too.

      In some places the accent color gets lightened or darkened a bit for usability purposes, which is why not all of them share the exact same color.

      Like

  7. oh my… “update and Shut Down”…

    I can finally stop using the
    “update my system while I’m working at the cost of slowness and instability and just keep forever-using “update and shutdown” everyday while being sure my system is always updated!

    (that will also work with OS, upgrades, surely…)

    well, if there was that feeling of “can’t wait for 6.2” even before 6.1 was out now there’s a “is that out already?!” feeling!!!

    Thank you 🙂!

    Maybe I just really like clocks, ok?

    yeah… you could set each with different time just for the fun of it ahahah

    about the widget’s thing: will we finally get the “update widgets” function fixed for 6.2 as well? That’s looking bad!

    Like

    Reply

    1. When I implemented it I didn’t implement it for OS upgrades, only updates, as I have no way of actually testing the functionality. I can add it though, wouldn’t be too difficult if it makes sense.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. Oh PLEASE do so!!!

      It makes total sense!!!

      And I trully hope you can even stick it into 6.2… would hate to have to wait for another major version!!!

      (naturally others may not agree, but this makes all the sense to me!!! This way I don’t have to wait a lot of – working – time for the OS to upgrade! I just let it upgrading at the end of the day and come back the next morning to a new version… so PLEASE it makes all sense!!!)

      Like

  8. In Dolphin 24.08 you decided to break my UX again:

    • now the folder I came from is no longer selected
    • now the item I double-clicked is no longer selected (even if it was selected before) – this is complete nonsense

    It’s annoying as hell! And there’s no way to fix it, other than patching Dolphin. If you cater to every clumsy user who doesn’t care what they’re deleting, it won’t end well.

    At the same time, you decided to keep the automatic selection of the next or previous item when deleting the current one. Brilliant!

    Like

    Reply

    4. As you can see from https://invent.kde.org/system/dolphin/-/merge_requests/766, I actually had no involvement; I didn’t even know this change happened, and can barely notice it now. However I’m afraid your rude and accusatory tone makes me ill-inclined to look into this matter. Had you expressed yourself kindly, I might have felt motivated to do so, but as is, I don’t think I will spend my fairly limited time on it. I’ll leave it up to someone else who noticed and didn’t like this change to make their case in the relevant places, with the reminder that graciousness and kindness are more effective social tools than accusations and sourness.

      Like

    6. I use the implicit selection of up-folder quite often to delete the directories I reviewed (like to check if there is some file I want to preserve/etc).

      From the quick look at bug 424723 seems like one user believes this is UX bug, not based on some UX telemetry data or UX research?

      You can count me into the opposite camp. 🙂 (well, I could re-learn to hit space to select the folder, but I guess I’m now used to the directory being selected, so I’m pretty sure it will annoy for few years before I reprogram myself)

      Like

    7. I actually had no involvement

      https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=424723#c6

      Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend anyone, but it’s more of a desperation tone. I really wonder why developers make such strange decisions. I really wonder how one or two developers can make such changes without asking users if it will break their UX.

      I really still like KDE, but with every decision like this, I’m thinking more and more about switching to something else. Actually, I’m currently using a patched version of KDE, so I can fix this for myself, but the average user would rather do what I said above than report a bug and have a long conversation with the author of the change who will convince them that they are wrong.

      Like

    8. I really wonder why developers make such strange decisions. I really wonder how one or two developers can make such changes without asking users if it will break their UX.

      Another way to look at this is that it’s equally possible to create a thought experiment that it was an accident.

      And even if it wasn’t accidental, using that kind of attitude will be far easier for the developers to hear and respond favorably to.

      Like

    9. Ok, I finally have seen it in action at home where I have KDE neon and it voids my previous comment.

      I can’t just hit space after going Alt+up. Just hitting space will enter selection mode in latest Dolphin, but not select the directory itself.

      So I guess my new combo (in case I want to have the parent dir selected) will be alt+up,down,up to end with selected dir.

      Through evening yesterday I didn’t run into such situation even once (except trying it out deliberately), so maybe I will get used to this change. I still don’t like it, it also sort of breaks visuals as you have the file under cursor selected all the time while navigating with arrows, but then alt+up does something different and also I’m not worried about accidentally deleting wrong selection. But I don’t have any data to support my view either (I could be just victim of years of habit). Let’s see how many users will consider this “bug” and report it, I guess that will bring some kind of statistics data.

      Like

  9. My wife recently got a laptop for personal projects. With her agreeing that she didn’t want to muck around with Copilot, Recall, etc., we installed Fedora KDE Spin with her stating that she’ll have questions, but will figure out Linux on the way.

    Other than figuring out a particularly tricky issue involving Wine dotnet installation for specific software she wanted to use, her experience has been smooth as silk – everything seems to be where she expects it and functions as she would expect. IMO that’s the hallmark of a desktop – can someone without prior experience A) see enough that’s familiar to not be scared away and B) be prompted appropriately for the things that are different so they can figure it out?

    Plasma 6.1 seems to hit the mark there tremendously well. Without getting into the intricacies of exact panel and window configuration for folks who have highly specific “workflows”, it’s a free and open-source desktop environment that folks can just walk up to and start using, and can get a positive experience with Linux. That’s a tremendous boon for the whole community, and hopefully all those involved hear it often enough that for the “regular user” it’s both pretty and functional.

    (And yes, her laptop is AMD-only, but I’ve got the same level of experience working now on my Nvidia desktop thanks to all the work over the past few months on that front! Typing this from a blazing fast and smooth, non-buggy Nvidia+Wayland setup)

    Liked by 2 people

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    1. That’s so wonderful to hear, just how things should be! It’s exactly what I aspire for Plasma to be.

      FWIW it’s been exactly the same way for my wife, pretty much smooth sailing. Every once in a while she’ll bring something in Plasma to my attention, and 100% of the time it’s something that would be useful to improve to make the desktop more usable for others. Most recently, she’s battle-tested a bunch of the error messaging in Discover.

      Like

    2. UI compliments aside, there’s also a major noticeable improvement is how stable everything acts – I can’t remember the last time I had a plasmashell crash, KWin kerfuffle, or a similarly system-disruptive event like that (when that seemed to be happening regularly on an Nvidia system ~a year ago).

      I’m one of those weirdos who uses a single panel, Breeze theme, and things like that, so perhaps that has something to do with it though 🙂

      Like

  10. system-update-shutdown ? added and will release at the next update of the iconsthemes,

    is the name right ?

    best

    Blacky

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    Reply

    2. Icon Selector, the Theme Creators need a Overview from the exist Icons from the default icontheme, without and with symbolic icons, maybe add at the Searchpaneel the both view(ports?), “all Icons without Symbolic in this Category” and “all Icons with Symbolic in this Category” therewith it is given fo see all exist icons and todo icons with or without symbolic icons… (and yes, i have finially found these possibility in the search panel *s*) but it’s maybe better if there a pulldown menu for see what’s actually the Status of Display in the Iconselector 🙂

      Best

      Blacky

      Like

    1. You already posted this earlier, and I deleted it because it was not relevant as I don’t have anything to do with KDE Neon.

      Please stop posting demanding, rude, or aggressive comments, or I will block your ability to post them. Be nice or be gone. Last warning.

      Like

    2. Posting as Guest is today a luxus and a leap of faith and should not make not bad by younger persons who make for all more bad or peoples who be the opinion they have something to have become support (and this without any payment) in a free Community where be supporting by donations or something .. and maybe become – no – Possibility’s=Money , it’s only a working together in the community with a common Agreed and working together, so, dont attak a Single Person because you have the Knowing not in the Brain, what you do or have to make in the right way, because, because, not younly aou be in able to post as Guest, manny Anonymous Users too where whant not make a Login at there many Servers and the whole Providers ..

      so, please, be a little careful what you post , because you can make for all more bad ..

      so, be Peaceful .. not “agressive” demanding .. and hold in the Head, Nate is the Chairman of KDE.org, head orgination of the Plasma Desktop .

      best regards

      Blacky

      p.s.: “could be update the the dev iso image, or have you nothing to do with” would be the right possibility/tone 😉

      Like

    3. I thought my comment was not published.

      Please stop posting demanding, rude, or aggressive comments

      If you find this comment demanding, rude or aggressive, please feel free to block me.

      Like

    4. like me once, because of the browser cache.., but, popov895 you should have in the mind, you have a network-ip and a posting time ( so the time of your Posting, and the IP and login name data can be obtained from the provider ) , you shouldn’t be too cheeky, knowing that you’re annoying people with that sentence, show a little decency 😉 And be a bit more in the community for working together.
      It’s not necessary that you nerf a boss from a WM (even if you don’t use this WM) so you shouldn’t get personal, because that can backfire, even if you use proxies and VPN tunneling, this tunnel can also be tracked.. So be peaceful and have a nice day 😉

      best
      Blacky 😉

      Like

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