A bunch of KDE apps received many lovely new features, bugfixes, and user interface improvements this week! And Plasma too, of course. 🙂 Let’s get right to it:

New Features

Elisa now lets you edit tracks’ metadata from inside the app! (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 20.12):

Elisa now lets you easily find the on-disk location of each song (me: Nate graham, Elisa 20.12):

Konsole now has a configurable toolbar (which you can of course hide if you don’t like it) (Tomaz Canabrava, Konsole 21.04):

You can now download new KRunner Runners from store.kde.org straight from the System Settings page! (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.21):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin no longer frequently crashes when typing in the Filter Bar (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 20.12)

Dolphin once again shows the correct number of files inside symlinked folders (Méven Car, Dolphin 20.12)

Dolphin is now more reliable and less likely to freeze in the face of network flakiness (Méven Car, Dolphin 20.12)

Dolphin’s ISO mounter plugin no longer fails to mount the same ISO twice and now correctly unmounts the underlying loop device too (Kwon-Young Choi, Dolphin 20.12)

Middle-clicking on tabs in Kate once again closes them (Robert-André Mauchin, Kate 20.12)

In Elisa, touch scrolling and fast scrolling by holding down the Shift key while scrolling now work (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.12)

Elisa now accepts album art for albums with the art in a file named albumart.[jpg|png] (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.12)

When Elisa is loading a view, the progress spinner no longer overlaps some placeholder text (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.12)

Plasma Disks no longer sometimes crashes when mounting a USB disk (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.20.3)

The Lock screen’s “Switch User” action is once again visible for people using distros that ship an up-to-date version of systemd (Wolfgang Bauer, Plasma 5.20.3)

After mounting an external disk, the Disks & Devices popup no longer hilariously/terrifyingly jumps between different screens of a multi-screen setup when each screen has its own panel with a System Tray on it (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.20.3

Icons in the Alt+Tab task switcher are once again displayed correctly for a wide variety of apps (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.20.3)

Discover can once again install locally-downloaded distro package files (e.g. .rpm and .deb files) (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.20.4)

Right-clicking on something in the Kicker or Kickoff launcher menus now causes the context menu to appear instantly the first time (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.20.4)

In the System Settings Cursors page, the menu of available cursor sizes now displays those cursors with their real sizes (David Redondo, Plasma 5.20.4):

In the Plasma Wayland session, Dragging tabs from Firefox over the desktop no longer crashes the whole session (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)

Context menus for 3rd-party System Tray items no longer sometimes stack up on top of each other when right-clicking on multiple consecutive applets (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.21)

On the System Settings Window Decorations page, the border size text no longer gets cut off when using a scale factor or a language with longer text than English (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.21):

The sound check feature on the System Settings Audio Volume page no longer causes your subwoofer to make odd noises (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.21)

Circular timeout indicators inside notifications are no longer invisible under certain circumstances (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21)

After updating items from store.kde.org using either Discover or the Get New [Thing] Window, some of those things no longer inaccurately show up as updateable the next time you check for updates (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.76)

Fixed one of the ways that Discover could crash when performing updates that include any add-ons (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.77)

In the Plasma Wayland session, you can now re-assign keyboard shortcuts without accidentally triggering their actions in the process (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.77)

Using Meta+Tab as a shortcut in the System Settings Shortcuts page no longer results in the word “tab” being visually duplicated in the shortcut chooser box (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.77)

When using a fractional scale factor, Konsole no longer displays ugly horizontal lines in some places with some font sizes (Someone awesome, Qt 5.15.1)

User Interface Improvements

Dolphin’s URL navigator now lives in its toolbar! (Felix Ernst, Dolphin 20.12):

Hovering the cursor over a Places Panel item now displays a little tooltip with the full path to that location (Méven Car, Dolphin 20.12):

All of the appearance-related pages in System Settings have now been re-organized to live inside a top-level “Appearance” list item which takes you to the Global Themes page, to make it more clear that Global Themes can potentially affect all of them (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.21)

You can probably see a lot of minor visual glitches in the above video; we’ll try to have then fixed by the final Plasma 5.21 release.

The way you add and switch between timezones in the digital clock applet has been totally overhauled to clarify the difference between changing the systemwide timezone and changing the timezone in the applet, and to make it easier to change the systemwide time zone (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)

The System Settings KWin Rules page now warns you when you try to set rules for a window not managed by KWin which can’t be affected by window rules (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.21)

Further refined the appearance of the Media Player applet (Mikel Johnson, Plasma 5.21):

When you set a custom keyboard shortcut to activate the System Tray’s popup, the shortcut now also closes it if it’s currently open as well, as it does for other applets (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.21)

The Networks applet now has its search field integrated into the header area and visible by default, rather than hidden behind a button (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21):

Separators between list items in Kirigami-based apps now have a more subtle and less attention-getting appearance (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.77):

The desktop drag-and-drop menu no longer has an unnecessary extra separator in it (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.77)

Section headers in Kirigami-based apps now word-wrap properly when they are very long or when their window/view is very narrow (Carson Black, Frameworks 5.77)

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Phew, that felt more like a month’s worth of work. I am constantly in awe of the KDE community’s productivity!

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover 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!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week the new Plasma System Monitor app had its first independent release! This app is a future replacement for the current KSysGuard monitoring app, and features a radically better user interface, an overview page with “just the facts”, simpler and more powerful customizability, and an easy to understand “Applications” page that shows individual apps rather than processes.

This app has been in development for almost two years and it’s really cool! We’re expecting it to eventually replace KSysGuard once it’s gotten some more use in the wild, but for now it is an independent release. Distros should be packaging it soon. Please install it and give it a try! Bug reports should be filed here.

But we kept plugging away on other stuff too…

New Features

Dolphin’s Places Panel now shows inline free space indicators for mounted disks in the Places Panel (Chris Holland, Dolphin 20.12):

Kate now supports the Zig language server (Matheus C. França, Kate 20.12)

Changing your user password now prompts you to change your KWallet password to match it so that if they previously matched, they don’t accidentally drift out of sync, which is baffling and rage-inducing when it happens (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21):

Plasma Network manager’s OpenVPN module now supports multiple types of compression (Alfred Toth, Plasma 5.21)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin’s git integration plugin no longer interferes with command-line-based git interactions (Sebastian Englbrecht, Dolphin 20.12)

Dolphin no longer sometimes consumes 100% of CPU resources while the Folders panel is open and showing folders that don’t have any sub-folders (Méven Car, Dolphin 20.12)

Konsole no longer sometimes crashes when re-arranging split views or closing split views (Carlos Alves, Konsole 20.12)

Back and Forward navigation in Okular after using internal links now works again (Kezi Olio, Okular 20.12)

When using Spectacle’s feature to return focus to the app when pressing the screenshot key while it’s already open, now doing so will un-minimize the app if it happens to be minimized (David Redondo, Spectacle 20.12)

When using Kate’s vi mode, the search field no longer disappears if focused again while it’s already open (Jan Paul Batrina, Kate 20.12)

The “switch user” action is once again visible in the Kickoff Application launcher for people using distros with an older systemd–for real this time! (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20.3)

Switching users now actually works again after you invoke the action (Wolfgang Bauer, Plasma 5.20.3)

All the shutdown options are once again always visible for all people in the Kickoff application launcher (Michail Vourlakos, Plasma 5.20.3)

Fixed an obscure way that the Plasma Wayland session could crash (Lewis Lakerink, Plasma 5.20.3)

Opening the Network applet’s speed graph no longer erroneously causes the graph to show an implausibly high spike in data transfer that messes up the graph scale for all subsequent data (David Redondo, Plasma 5.20.3)

In the Plasma Wayland session, opening a laptop’s lid now immediately wakes it up, instead of this only happening after you press a key (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.20.3)

The System Settings Window Rules page no longer automatically scrolls itself after creating a new rule and hovering the cursor over the list of rules when there are already a ton of rules in the list (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.20.3)

The “number of CPU cores” sensor now displays the right information (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21)

When using the Plasma Wayland session with multiple virtual desktops, the name of the virtual desktop is now correct in Task Manager tooltips (Lewis Lakerink, Plasma 5.20)

Plasma applet headers now use the correct colors when using with Breeze Dark Plasma theme (Dominic Hayes, Frameworks 5.76)

Fixed a common crash in System Settings when opening various QML-based pages (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.76)

Notifications for file move or copy operations no longer include skipped files in the total number of files printed at the end (David Faure, Frameworks 5.76)

Thumbnails and previews throughout KDE software are now able to render 16-bit PSD files (Gary Wang, Frameworks 5.76)

User Interface Improvements

Inertial scrolling using the mouse now works when the cursor wraps around vertically after reaching the top or bottom of the window (David Hurka, Okular 1.11.3)

When you share an image to Imgur in Gwenview, there’s now a little notification in the UI that tells you it worked, shows the the link, and automatically copies it to the clipboard for you–just like in Spectacle (Nicolas Fella, Gwenview 20.12

The Samba server authentication dialog has been slimmed down and made more flexible so it can accommodate multiple different login types, with a handy help tooltip that helps you understand the various options (Harald Sitter, Dolphin 20.12):

Sheets in Kirigami-based software now close when you hit the Escape key (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 5.76)

Draggable list items in Kirigami-based software now use the grabby hand cursor when the cursor is hovered over or dragging on the grab handle (Ismael Asensio, Frameworks 5.76)

The System Setting Accessibility page has been rewritten in QML and given a fancy new user interface (Tomaz Canabrava, Plasma 5.21):

System Tray applets now all have a visible Configure button in their header, as well as a hamburger menu showing all additional actions. This makes all System Tray applets full functionality 100% usable on touch and without having to right-click anything (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.21):

Check it out: SSD headerbars in the Plasma System Tray lol!

Icons in the System Tray expanded view are no longer quite so close to the header (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.21)

System Settings’ Notifications page now supports the “Highlight Changed Settings” feature (Cyril Rossi, Plasma 5.21)

The little pop-up menu that appears when you hover over a Panel applet while in Edit Mode now looks prettier (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.21):

After last week’s mixed feedback about the new UI style for the System Settings Audio page, we made a few changes which should hopefully improve it a bit (with more to come): We now use standard style section headers, and the “Show Inactive Devices” button has now been moved to the footer area (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.21):

Changed the menu text for the “turn off do not disturb” feature to be a bit more clear (Thiago Sueto, Plasma 5.20):

Those of you who liked the old Alt+Tab switcher’s behavior of placing minimized windows at the end of the list can now get that old behavior behavior back by adding MoveMinimizedWindowsToEndOfTabBoxFocusChain=true to the [TabBox] group
of your ~/.config/kwinrc file. In the future we may add a GUI to control this, but the the moment it is a hidden feature that requires manually modifying the config file (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)

Icons in collapsed sidebars in various Kirigami-based apps (e.g. and the Emoji input panel and the new Plasma System Monitor) are now horizontally centered as expected (David Redondo, Frameworks 5.76)

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover 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!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This week the bug squashing continues at full speed! We’ve made short work of tons of bugs throughout our software stack, including the infamous login sound bug, some very important and longstanding issues with extended attributes, and a ton of quality-of-life improvements for the Plasma Wayland session.

But we also managed to add a few nice new features that I think you’ll like. 🙂 Check it all out:

New Features

There’s a new “Breeze Twilight” global theme with a dark appearance for Plasma and a light appearance for apps (Dominic Hayes, Plasma 5.21):

There’s now an option to change the first day of the week in the Digital Clock’s calendar popup (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.21)

KWin’s Desktop Grid effect can now be configured to only activate desktops on click, rather than activating both desktops and windows, if you happen to click on a window (Konstantinos Smanis, Plasma 5.21)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Konsole’s “Manage Profiles…” Menu item now takes you to the right place (Carlos Alves, Konsole 20.08.3)

Konsole’s context menu now displays the right number of “Open With…” and “Copy Location” menu items in the right place after right-clicking on various different types of things (Carlos Alves, Konsole 20.08.3

Middle-clicking on any of the tabs in Okular’s sidebar tab bar no longer closes one of the open documents (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 1.11.3)

Dolphin’s background daemon mode no longer triggers session restoration, which should fix an issue with Dolphin always opening at login on Fedora (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 20.12)

Okular’s command-line --find parameter now works properly if you feed it non-Latin characters (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 1.11.3)

Closing an open tab in Okular no longer causes the Ctrl+Tab shortcut used for tab navigation to stop working (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 20.12)

The Plasma Wayland session no longer requires that you manually set an environment variable to make NVIDIA GPUs using the proprietary driver function properly. If this sounds like a big deal, it is! (Vlad Zahorodnii and Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.20.2)

The Plasma Wayland session no longer crashes when you hover the cursor over a Task Manager item to display a window preview when PipeWire is not installed (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20.2)

Plasma no longer crashes when certain apps do weird things with their PIDs (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20.2)

For people who turned on the login sound, it is once again played at login as expected (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20.2)

Fixed tons and tons of recent visual regressions in the System Tray: the highlight effect for the active System Tray item is once again large enough to completely fit the item’s icon; tray icons in very thick panels are once again centered in the panel; Multi row/column layouts no longer sometime overlap adjacent Panel widgets; Clicks are no longer eaten by the expander arrow in certain multi-row/column layouts (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.20.2)

In a Wayland session, dragging files and icons no longer shows broken, clipped, or pixelated thumbnails (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20.2)

The System Settings Users page now lets you apply the same change to multiple profile fields if you want to (Alexander Potashev, Plasma 5.20.2)

Volume and brightness OSDs on the lock screen once again show the correct values (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20.2)

In the wallpaper chooser view, the “Get New Plugins…” button no longer sometimes overlaps the combobox next to it (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20.2)

Moving the cursor outside of the widget explorer once again makes the selection highlight effect disappear correctly (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20.2)

KSysGuard no longer leaks lots of memory when left open for a long period of time (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20.3)

Plasma Icon applets that point to locations rather than applications once again work properly (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20.3)

In a Plasma Wayland session, the “Sliding Popups” effect used for various panel widgets no longer suffers from minor visual glitches (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20.3)

Discover no longer ever automatically opens at login when it was open at logout as this is not useful (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20.3)

System Settings’ “Highlight Changed Settings” feature now remembers whether it was on or off when you close and re-open System Settings (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.20.3)

Double-clicking on System Settings’ “Highlight Changed Settings” button now toggles it on and then off again as expected, instead of eating the second click and leaving it in an inconsistent state (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.20.3)

System Tray items for certain Electron apps that don’t properly set their titles will now at least display something sane for the text (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.20.3)

The Plasma Wayland session no longer crashes when you drag something from an XWayland app to a Wayland app (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.21)

The Plasma Wayland session no longer crashes when you drag an icon from Kickoff to Konsole (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)

In a Plasma Wayland session, pasting text that was copied inside an XWayland app once again works (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21)

In a Plasma Wayland session, dragging something in Firefox no longer causes the cursor to get stuck displaying a grabby hand forever lol (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20.1)

Reduced the amount of CPU resources that KWin used to draw hardware-accelerated cursors (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)

KWin no longer tries to use a connected VR headset as another screen (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.21)

The window minimize animation is no longer sometimes a bit glitchy when using a multi-monitor setup while an app is playing a video on a rotated monitor (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.21)

The KIO library now fully supports preserving extended attributes during common file manipulation operations (Gleb Popov, Frameworks 5.76)

In a Wayland session, KRunner no longer takes up unnecessary CPU resources when visible but it doesn’t look like anything is happening (Fabian Vogt, Frameworks 5.76)

Moving the mouse over different items in the file open/save dialogs while the preview panel is open now causes the preview to always update properly (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.76)

User Interface Improvements

The two ways of maximizing a split view in Konsole now behave identically (Carlos Alves, Konsole 20.08.3)

Screenshots taken with Spectacle now appear in the list of recent documents in the Places Panel that’s visible in Dolphin, the file dialogs, and various other pieces of software (Méven Car, Spectacle 20.08.3)

In the System Settings Online Accounts page, errors when connecting to external accounts are now displayed in the UI rather than silently ignored (Nicolas Fella, kaccounts-integration 20.12)

The “New Tab” button on Konsole’s tab bar now has a tooltip (Carlos Alves, Konsole 20.12)

Window rules are now allowed to position windows with negative X and Y values, if you really want (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.20.2)

Files and folders on the desktop can now properly be interacted with using a touchscreen, including press-and-hold to emulate a right-click (Steffen Hartlieb, Plasma 5.21)

KRunner search results no longer display uninstalled apps so prominently (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21)

The System Settings Audio Volume now has a fancy new layout that’s much simpler and dispenses with the multi-tab view (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.21):

The System Settings Window Rules page now supports the “Highlight Changed Settings” feature (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.21)

The System Settings Task Switcher, Window Behavior and General Behavior pages now fully support the “Highlight Changed Settings” feature (Cyril Rossi, Plasma 5.21)

When using the setting to open files and folders with double-click, System Settings’ icon view now opens pages with a single-click, not a double-click (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)

The context menu for file-based notifications now includes a “Move to Trash” item just in case you suddenly realize you don’t need the file after all (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.21):

The bracket matching feature in Kate, KDevelop, and other KTextEditor-based apps now matches angle brackets too (Milian Wolff, Frameworks 5.76)

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover 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!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

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Last week’s post: https://pointieststick.com/2020/10/24/this-week-in-kde-title/

We spent a ton of time this week polishing up Plasma 5.20 and fixing the last few regressions that were reported during the beta period. Hopefully this release should be much smoother and more stable than the last few have been! We’ve really been trying to up our QA game lately. And of course, we’re already looking to the next version, and new features are starting to land…

New Features

Gwenview now has an option to not auto-play videos in browse mode (Madhav Kanbur, Gwenview 20.12)

On Wayland, KWin now supports the “iGPU multi-monitor” feature and therefore allows you to simultaneously drive multiple monitors from both a dedicated and internal Intel GPU! (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.21)

KRunner now has an optional “keep open” feature which causes it to stay open when focus is lost, just like how the System Tray and Clock popups can (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.21):

Plasma will now display a notification when your network connection becomes flaky and you’re about to lose internet access (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.21):

Text fields in Kirigami and QML-based desktop apps now display appropriate context menus when you right-click on them (Yeah yeah yeah I know, it’s 2020 and we’re only now getting this… but still, now we have it!) (Devin Lin, Frameworks 5.75):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Krfb now saves and remembers user settings such as settings “Enable desktop sharing”, “Enable Unattended Access” and “Password” (Alexey Min, Krfb 20.08.2)

Mounting an ISO image using the ISO mounter Dolphin plugin now results in it actually being mounted if you have automounting globally disabled (Kwon-Young Choi, Dolphin 20.12)

Spectacle’s background mode now auto-saves images as expected when that option is set in the settings window (Antonio Prcela, Spectacle 20.12)

Partition Manager now recognizes devices without a partition table (Andrius Štikonas, Partition Manager 4.2.0)

KWin no longer sometimes crashes when exiting or re-launching (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20)

Plasma no longer sometimes leaks memory and crashes when exiting or re-launching (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20)

Pinned Icons-Only Task Manager apps no longer randomly jump around when any of the apps come from Flatpak, Snap, Steam, or have a URL scheme beginning with “preferred://", as two of the four default items do (Eike Hein, Plasma 5.20)

Fixed the initialization of dmabuf textures in KWin on Wayland, which in practical terms should ensure that videos played Firefox no longer sometimes display garbage instead of the video (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20)

The functionality in the System Settings Shortcuts page to import an existing shortcut scheme now works again (David Redondo, Plasma 5.20)

The Disks & Devices applet no longer ever shows the “Remove All” button when there are any non-removable devices in the list (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20)

Events in the event list on the Digital Clock pop-up are no longer all scrunched up together (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20)

KRunner is now more responsive to typed text on Wayland (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.20)

Dragging a webp or tiff image onto the desktop now shows the option to set the image as the current wallpaper, just like it already does for images in other formats (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20)

Plasma’s System Monitor widgets no longer leak memory (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.75)

When a Plasma Vault is in an error state, its System Tray icon no longer disappears (Alexander Stippich, Frameworks 5.75)

Discover should no longer sometimes crash when canceling the password dialog (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.75)

KDE Neon now adds the Flathub repo to Discover by default (Harald Sitter, in the next update)

User Interface Improvements

Dolphin no longer bugs you with an “are you sure you want to close multiple tabs?” dialog when you’re using its (on by default) “remember window state” feature (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 20.08.2)

Plasma 5.20’s new feature to smoothly animate brightness changes is now only enabled when your screen exposes enough levels of brightness to make it look good (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.20)

The System Settings Window Decorations page now supports the “Highlight Changed Settings” feature (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.21)

The background highlight effect for Task Manager items now extends to the edges of the panel (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 5.21):

When selecting new properties in the System Settings Windows Rules page, the property selection sheet now closes immediately after you’ve used it to select a property so you can immediately configure it (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.21)

After installing a 3rd-party applet which adds a System Tray item, the item now appears in the System Tray immediately, without having to restart Plasma (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.21)

System Settings pages now have perfectly consistent margins on all sides (Ismael Asensio and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20 and Frameworks 5.75)

System Settings now has a unified titlebar/header appearance when using a compatible color scheme (i.e. one of the ones used in the Breeze Evolution work, like the new Breeze Light and Breeze Dark color schemes) (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.75):

ToolButtons in Kirigami and QML-based desktop apps now visually indicate when they have keyboard focus (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.76)

Applets which have been given a keyboard shortcut to make them activate will now deactivate when that shortcut is pressed again (…except for the System Tray, which needs extra work that’s coming soon) (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.76)

Red subtitle text for almost-full devices in the Disks & Devices System Tray applet is now more readable (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.76)

Comboboxes in Kirigami and other QML-based desktop apps which have enough items to be scrollable now draw the scrollbar part using the correct color (George Florea Bănuș, Frameworks 5.76)

Editable comboboxes in Plasma and Plasma applets now close their popups when clicking outside of then (Chris Holland, Frameworks 5.76)

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover 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!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Pieces of our much-awaited Breeze Evolution UI refresh have begun landing this week! Now windows, Plasma pop-ups, and notifications have a distinctly colored visually separated “tools area” at the top, window shadows become smaller for inactive windows, and sidebars in settings windows are using all-colorful icons!

These improvements have been developed by Carson Black, Noah Davis, Niccolò Venerandi, Lindsay Roberts, and me: Nate Graham–aided greatly by the rest of the KDE VDG team! Watch this space for more to come. Plasma 5.21 is going to be the release where all of this stuff gets shipped, and I’m very excited about it! 🙂

Now keep in mind this is pretty early in the Plasma 5.21 dev cycle, so before the release, there may be tweaks and adjustments to the final appearance of anything I post here.

And also, that’s not even the half of it! All sorts of other cool stuff was done as well:

New Features

Kate’s file browser now has an “Open with” menu item in its context menu (Mario Aichinger, Kate 20.12):

Filelight now has a feature to save the current view as an SVG file (Martin Tobias Holmedahl Sandsmark, Filelight 20.12):

KWin’s Wayland virtual keyboard support now works for GTK apps! (Bhushan Shah, Plasma 5.21)

System Settings’ “Highlight Changed Settings” feature now works for the KWin window management pages too (Cyril Rossi, Plasma 5.21)

The Elisa music player now has a fancy new website, courtesy of Anubhav Choudhary, Nikunj Goyal, and Carl Schwan!

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Gwenview’s photo importer no longer hangs when you try to exit it (Gwenview 20.08.2)

Okular’s “Page Up/Down overlap” setting now works again (Kishore Gopalakrishnan, Okular 1.11.2)

When using an automatic document feeder to scan with Skanlite, it’s no longer possible to select multiple capture areas, since this concept only makes sense when using a flatbed scanner (Kåre Särs, Skanlite 20.12)

Dolphin now be interacted with using a Wacom tablet pen (Steffen Hartlieb, Dolphin 20.12)

Ark’s “Save As…” menu item has been renamed to “Save Copy As…” to reflect what it will actually do (Elvis Angelaccio, Ark 20.12)

KWin no longer crashes when activating a hotcorner with the mouse, and then continuing to push the mouse into the hotcorner after it’s been activated (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.18.6)

The “Switch user” action which has been missing from Kickoff and Kicker is now back (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while editing the settings of system monitor widgets (David Redondo, Plasma 5.20)

Fixed a very odd case where Plasma could crash when scrolling on the desktop when due to the number of virtual desktops being incorrectly reported as 1 instead of some number higher than 1 (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20)

Discover no longer displays an incorrect number of packages to update under certain circumstances (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.20)

When not using the “Fade Popups” KWin effect, the shadows of context menus no longer briefly remain visible after the context menus are closed (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20)

On Wayland, context menus on the desktop and throughout Plasma now close when they’re supposed to (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20)

On Wayland, Task Manager tooltip window thumbnails are no longer overlapped by the app’s icon (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20)

On Wayland, pressing Ctrl+Alt+Esc twice no longer results in the “Click a window to kill it” message being re-positioned into the top-left corner of the screen (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20)

Toolbar buttons that open menus now always display the correct color for the downward-pointing arrow that indicates this (David Redondo, Plasma 5.20)

The window-specific KWin Rules dialog is now properly translated (Albert Astals Cid, Plasma 5.20)

Discover no longer shows translation errors for updatable packages whose version numbers are missing for some reason (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21)

Trashing files on external disks now uses the trash folder for that disk rather than usually first copying the files to the trash folder on the root volume (David Faure, Frameworks 5.75)

When KDE app windows are allowed to restore their prior positions when re-opened, opening new instances of already-open apps no longer causes the existing windows to be completely covered up; instead, the window manager is allowed to position these windows (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.75)

Discover no longer sometimes crashes when trying to update certain add-ons from store.kde.org (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.75)

Discover no longer silently fails to update certain addons from store.kde.org (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.75)

The distinct header area throughout various Plasma applets is once again visible when using the Breeze Dark Plasma theme (not the default Breeze Plasma theme with a dark color scheme; the actual Breeze Dark Plasma theme) (Harald Sitter and me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.75)

The setting for making a scrollview jump directly to the clicked position in the scroll track now applies to scrollviews in QML-based desktop software as well (Bharadwaj Raju, Frameworks 5.75)

Lokalize’s main window now displays correctly on Wayland (Albert Astals Cid, Frameworks 5.75)

Tooltips throughout Plasma once again have the correct visual appearance (only people using the Plasma 5.20 beta ever saw the regression, hopefully) (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.75)

Labels for list items in the timezone chooser view (as well as other lists using the CheckDelegate QtQuickControls2 item) now use the correct text color when the checkbox is checked (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.75)

User Interface Improvements

Kate’s config dialog now uses a nice pretty icon-style sidebar like most other KDE apps do (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 20.12):

Overhauled the visuals of the Nextcloud and Owncloud wizards in the System Settings Online Accounts page (Nicolas Fella, Kaccounts-integration 20.12)

Elisa’s Configure Shortcuts window no longer shows empty columns for non-existent global shortcuts (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.12):

The Info Center Samba Status page has received a fancy visual overhaul (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.20):

The Spellcheck plugin is now activated by default in KRunner. You can invoke it by typing “spell [misspelled word]” (Alexander Lohnau, Plasma 5.21)

Navigation-style sidebars in Discover and other Kirigami apps now look more like the one in System Settings, bring them into consistency with one another (me: Nalate Graham, Frameworks 5.75)

The animations for the System Tray highlight and Kickoff Application Launcher’s tab switching are now more responsive (Andy Salerno, Frameworks 5.75)

Form layout user interfaces no longer have an awkward left indent when in narrow mode (Devin Lin, Frameworks 5.75):

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover 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!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

We spent a lot of this week polishing up Plasma 5.20 and fixing bugs you’ve all found in the release. Thanks very much too all the people who have been testing it and reporting bugs! It’s very helpful. As a reminder, you can find distros shipping the beta here: https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Live_Images

New Features

Okular’s animated smooth scrolling feature can now be totally disabled in the app itself (me: Nate Graham)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Kate’s File menu no longer ever loses menu items after closing a tab (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 20.08.2)

Okular’s editable forms are no longer mis-rendered when inertially scrolling (Kezi Olio, Okular 1.11.2)

When your scanner can almost but not quite fit a particular page size, Skanlite will now display the option to scan to that page size anyway (e.g. 215mm wide scan beds now give you the option to scan using the US Letter page size) (Kåre Särs, libksane 20.12)

The text of Elisa’s keyboard shortcuts are now translated properly (Nikunj Goyal, Elisa 20.12)

Clearing the clipboard history on Wayland no longer crashes Plasma (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20)

Improved the Plasma SVG cache heuristics such that various things which might sometimes be invisible after upgrading Plasma now show up like they’re supposed to (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 5.20)

On Wayland, clicking on a Task Manager entry while that entry’s tooltip is visible no longer crashes Plasma (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20)

On Wayland, clicking on a Task Manager thumbnail now activates that window, as you would expect (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.20)

On Wayland, the window stacking order is now always correct (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20)

Auto-hidden panels now have an animated show/hide effect again (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20)

The hover effect for titlebar buttons in GTK headerbar apps once again appears when it should (Mikhail Zolotukhin, Plasma 5.20

The names of the System Settings and Info Center apps are now translated properly (Alexander Potashev, Plasma 5.20)

The Plasma Emoji input window now always shows nice colorful emojis even if the distro’s fontconfig files are kind of messed up (Yunhe Guo, Plasma 5.20)

The little arrow in a System Settings list items for a top-level category will no longer appear if the category’s existence is obfuscated because it has only a single item, in which case System Settings automatically takes you to the child item (David Redondo, Plasma 5.20)

Shortcuts for switching to particular Activities now work again when set from the relevant System Settings page (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20)

Plasma applet configuration windows now always display the correct sidebar appearance (David Redondo, Plasma 5.20)

On Wayland, context menus now always have shadows, as expected (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20)

Breeze buttons now display the correct colors when using certain non-default color schemes (Carson Black, Plasma 5.20)

Improved how KWin detects fully opaque windows, which will allow it to do less work by not rendering anything that’s entirely covered up by them (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.21)

You’re no longer annoyingly asked whether you want to execute non-executable script files when you try to open them (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.75)

It’s once again possible to enter shortcuts in the System Settings Shortcuts page that use the Alt Key when the Alt+something shortcut that you’re defining would otherwise trigger an action on the shortcut entry page itself! (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.75)

Apps which show an “Are you sure you want to close multiple documents?” dialog when you quit while multiple documents are open will no longer do so if the app is quit as a part of the normal shutdown sequence when session saving is in use (Allen Sandfield Jensen, Frameworks 5.75)

User avatars in the Kickoff Application Launcher and the new System Settings Users page are no longer blurry (Carson Black, Frameworks 5.75)

Button icons on the login and lock screens are no longer mis-colored (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.75)

User Interface Improvements

Pressing the Esc key in Gwenview while in full screen view now leaves full screen view the first time you press it, instead of first going back to browse mode (Michael Augaitis, Gwenview 20.12)

Elisa now has keyboard shortcuts to go back and forward by track while in the app itself (Ctrl+left arrow and Ctrl+right arrow) (Nikunj Goyal, Elisa 20.12)

Newly-generated thumbnail preview images will no longer longer embed mostly-transparent mimetype icons in the bottom-right corner, which were super confusing (Stefan Brüns, Dolphin 20.12)

Scrollbars in GTK apps using the Breeze GTK theme are now the correct width (Carson Black, Plasma 5.20)

After changing the charge limit on your battery, you’re only shown a message saying, “You may need to re-connect your charger” if it’s currently plugged in (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.20)

System Settings and Info Center now have a “Report Bug…” menu item in their hamburger menus (David Redondo, Plasma 5.20)

The System Activity window (the thing that appears when you press Ctrl+Esc) now has correct margins (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20)

KRunner’s settings page now uses more accurate text for its new positioning modes feature (me: Ne Graham, Plasma 5.20)

Info Center now has a fancy new Network Interfaces page (Carl Schwan, Plasma 5.21)

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover 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!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

This was a pretty huge week for KDE. Apparently people had a lot of pent-up work, because right after Akademy finished last week, the floodgates started opening! Amazing stuff has been landing left and right every day this week! Some highlights are touch support in Dolphin, user-configurable per-view sort ordering in Elisa, optional Systemd startup, tons of Okular scrolling improvements, and much, much, much more.

Oh and meet Plasma 5.20’s beautiful new wallpaper, Shell:

Big thanks to Lucas Andrade for this beautiful wallpaper!

New Features

Dolphin now has full touch support! (Steffen Hartlieb, Dolphin 20.12)

Elisa now lets you sort each view by whatever criteria you want, and defaults to sorting albums by year (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 20.12)

Konsole now has a “focus follows mouse” feature for its split views that you can turn on to automatically focus the split view that the cursor passes over (Luc Dufresne, Konsole 20.12)

For those of you who liked Kate’s previous tab behavior–where it shows a limited number of tabs and automatically orders them according to recency of access in the sidebar–you can now use it again (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 20.12)

Spectacle now has command-line arguments to include or exclude window decorations or the cursor, overriding whatever is defined in the config file (Nazer Kalinowski, Spectacle 20.12)

Filelight now offers you an easy way to exclude a folder from further indexing (Efe Çiftci, Filelight 20.12):

Plasma now optionally uses Systemd for startup (when Systemd is available), which brings numerous benefits such as faster startup and load times, no more odd race conditions during startup causing weird bugs, better session cleanup on logout ending the possibility of logout hangs, better logging of what’s going on, the possibility of using slices and cgroups to improve responsiveness and clarity in system monitoring apps, and much more. It’s a very exciting change! This is currently optional and off by default, but it will eventually be turned on by default (only where available of course) once the remaining kinks are worked out. (David Edmundson, 5.21)

The System Settings Shortcuts page now also shows you which shortcuts have been changed from their defaults when using the “Highlight changed settings” feature (David Redondo, Plasma 5.21)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

When scrolling in Okular with a finger on the touchscreen or a mouse drag with the Browse tool, the view no longer “sticks” slightly for the first few pixels of movement (Kezi Olio, Okular 1.11.2)

Okular no longer crashes when trying to open malformed PDF documents with the same digital signature on multiple pages (Albert Astals Cid, Okular 1.11.2)

Middle-clicking on a tab in Kate now closes it again (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 20.08.2)

In Kate’s “Save modified documents” dialog, the Cancel button is now focused by default as it should be (Alexander Lohnau, Kate 20.12)

When annotating a document in Okular, the annotation tool’s tooltip no longer gets mistakenly painted over the document in certain circumstances (Pedro Arthur Pinheiro Rosa Duarte, Okular 20.12)

Partition Manager now correctly modifies the /etc/fstab file after you make changes (Andrius Štikonas, Partition Manager 4.2.0)

The Ctrl+d shortcut no longer unexpectedly moves selected desktop items to the trash (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.6 and 5.20)

Improved the graphics performance on Wayland (Gang Wu, Plasma 5.20)

It’s now possible to drag windows on Wayland from their empty areas, just like on X11 (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.20)

Discover no longer crashes when you visit its Settings page immediately after launching the app (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.75 or Plasma 5.20, whichever one you get first)

Running a VNC server inside a Plasma session no longer crashes the Plasma session (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.20)

On Wayland, Plasma no longer sometimes crashes when you hover the cursor over an auto-hide Panel (Andreas Haratzis, Plasma 5.20)

Open and Save dialogs can now open and save files containing double quotes in their names (Andreas Bontozoglou, Frameworks 5.75)

It’s once again possible to set custom shortcuts that use the Tab key (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.75)

Updating icon themes installed using the Get New Icons window now works (Alexander Lohnau, Frameworks 5.75)

Saving a file with a name that begins with a colon no longer causes the file to be saved to the base level of your home folder rather than wherever it is what you actually tried to save it to (Ahmad Samir, Frameworks 5.75)

User Interface Improvements

Single-line text in Elisa’s list-style views is now vertically centered as expected (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.08.2)

Elisa’s playlist sidebar now turns into a collapsible drawer on mobile or with a very narrow window, which means it’s no longer ever accessible (Stef Lep, Elisa 20.12)

Okular’s recently-added smooth scrolling animated transitions now respect the global animation speed multiplier, which means that people who hate animations and have then turned off globally now don’t have to live with the animated scrolling effects in Okular any longer. We still plan to add an off switch in Okular itself for people who want to disable smooth scrolling in just Okular or are using Okular on non-Plasma platforms (me: Nate Graham, Okular 20.12)

Discover now provides feedback on Arch-based distros when there is a dependency problem preventing updates from being installed (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.20)

KRunner now prioritizes apps higher than System Settings pages in the results view when there are matches for both (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.20)

When you try to assign a shortcut on the System Settings Shortcuts page that’s already used, you’re now warned immediately rather than only when you click the “Apply” button (David Redondo, Plasma 5.20)

System Settings’ sidebar view now displays little arrows for list items which are top-level categories containing other items (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.20)

You can now middle-click on the Night Color applet to toggle the feature on and off (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.20)

The Battery applet now shows the brightness percentage (Eugene Popov, Plasma 5.20)

VPN-related notifications and network authentication dialogs now use clearer and more consistent terminology (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)

It’s now possible to configure a keyboard shortcut in Kate to paste the text that was last selected by the mouse (usually you middle-click to paste this text) (Jonathan Poelen, Frameworks 5.75)

How You Can Help

Have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover 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!

Finally, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.