We’re nearing the release of the 19.12 versions of many KDE apps, and in the first third of the Plasma 5.18 cycle. With this week, all the major regressions from 5.17 that I’ve been tracking have gotten fixed! If you’re still suffering from other 5.17 regressions not listed here and not yet fixed, please let me know. We want to make sure that the 5.18 LTS release is as smooth and stable as possible.

New Features

• When KFind or another external search app is installed, Dolphin now shows a quick link to open it (which can also be added to the toolbar) (Piotr Henryk Dabrowski, Dolphin 20.04.0):
  
• The Properties dialog now shows a button that will take you to the target of a symlink (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.65):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Refreshing the music collection in Elisa no longer creates momentary duplicate entries (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 19.12.0)
• When a single song is in Elisa’s playlist and repeat is active, that song now actually repeats when it is finished playing (Alexander Stippich, Elisa 19.12.0)
• Discover’s Updates page no longer has a broken layout, sorry about that (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.17.4)
• Maximized or vertically-tiled windows no longer exhibit odd behaviors with respect to shadows and window sizes when de-maximized or un-tiled (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.17.4)
• Picture Of The Day wallpaper slideshows are once again usable from the lock screen (Yunhe Guo, Plasma 5.17.4)
• Tree views in GTK or GNOME applications are now visible when using a dark color scheme (Carson Black, Plasma 5.17.4)
• The list of applications and system services in the System Settings Notifications page now has full keyboard navigation (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.4)
• When using a Weather widget on a horizontal panel with the temperature display turned on, the size of the text now matches the size of the text for the default Digital Clock (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.4):
  
• A Folder View widget in a panel now uses the correct text color for selected (not highlighted) items (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.4):
  
• When entering your password on the lock screen, if the computer goes back to sleep while the password is still entered into the password field, it’s now cleared so people can’t see it when the computer wakes up again (Méven Car, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Changing your user’s real name in the System Settings Users page no longer resets the picture (Méven Car, Plasma 5.18.0)
• When changing your user picture, if you cancel the password prompt, your picture is no longer changed anyway (Méven Car, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Improved the reliability of fetching icons from internet sources in Kirigami-based apps, which should improve stability across the board in Discover, since it makes heavy use of this functionality (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Frameworks 5.65)
• The “Network” place in Dolphin now shows its true name in the Information Panel (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.65)
• Searching in Discover (and GNOME Software, and the pkcon command-line tool) is now case-insensitive on openSUSE (Carson Black, PackageKit 1.1.13)

User Interface Improvements

• Improved High DPI support in Yakuake so various icons are no longer blurry (Nicolas Höft, Yakuake 19.12.0)
• Dolphin’s URL navigator now auto-completes text as you type (Noah Davis, Dolphin 20.04.0)

How You Can Help

The KDE Frameworks 6 sprint is happening right now! Much work and planning for the future is being done. Alas, in just three days, all the work will not get done. This is where you can help! The KF6 workboard is chock full of small, manageable to-do items just begging for someone to knock a few out. Maybe you? 😉

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out more ways to help 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.

There are some neat things to report and I think you will enjoy them! In particular, I think folks are really going to like the improvements to GNOME/GTK app integration and two sets of touch- and scrolling-related improvements to Okular and the Kickoff Application Launcher, detailed below:

New Features

• GTK and GNOME apps now inherit the font, icon, cursor, and toolbar style settings for KDE apps instead of making you set them separately somewhere else (Mikhail Zolotukhin, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Checkboxes and radio buttons in GTK3 apps once again follow the colors in the color scheme. An upstream librsvg change fixed the issues we were having with this feature earlier, so we could bring it back for the next Plasma release! (Carson Black, Plasma 5.18.0)
• When scrolling in Okular with the mouse, touchscreen, or keyboard keys, the scroll transitions are now animated and have inertia. I find this to be a huge improvement for reading documents with a convertible laptop! (Kezi Olio, Okular 1.10.0)
• The Kickoff Application Launcher now has hugely improved touch support, including touch scrolling, drag-and-drop, and press-and-hold to show items’ context menus (Steffen Hartlieb, Plasma 5.18.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Dolphin’s git integration is now more reliable when displaying the status and available actions for large repos (Maciej Dems, Dolphin 19.12.0)
• When using Details view in Dolphin, the “Date Photographed” column is no longer empty for JPEG files containing valid EXIF Date/Time data (Méven Car, Dolphin 19.12.0)
• Fixed a bug that could cause the lock screen to get stuck while media was playing that included square album art (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.3)
• Rotated displays now remember their positions relative to other displays after the system is rebooted (Roman Gilg, Plasma 5.17.3)
• Scrollbar handles once again have the correct colors in GTK apps and Firefox (Carson Black, Plasma 5.17.3)
• Fixed a common crash in System Settings that could be triggered by visiting the same category twice (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.65)
• Disk images that have been mounted and unmounted now disappear from the Devices Notifier applet as expected (Rok Mandeljc, Frameworks 5.65 )
• File deletion is now multi-threaded, so for example deleting a large file no longer freezes Dolphin (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.65)

User Interface Improvements

• When the cursor is hovered over a file in dolphin, the information about that file shown in the status bar no longer disappears after a second (Méven Car, Dolphin 19.12.0)
• File metadata is now available while the Baloo file indexer is performing its initial indexing (Stefan Brüns, Dolphin 20.04.0)
• KMenuEdit’s search field is now focused by default, like other apps with always-visible search fields (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The color picker icons now use familiar eyedropper-style imagery (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.65):
  
• There are new icons for Search and the Baloo file indexer (Alexander Stippich, Frameworks 5.65):
  
• Spectacle now offers OBS Studio as another option for screen recording (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.65)

How You Can Help

Do you like icons? Of course you do! But more importantly, are you interested in helping to make them? I bet you are! And you should be, because there’s lots to do! Luckily, it’s actually really easy, and we have a page in the Human Interface Guidelines that describes the rules to help guide you along. Icons in the Breeze icon theme are vector SVG files, and we use Inkscape to make and edit them. I started doing it recently with no prior experience whatsoever in either icon design or the Inkscape program. My work was crude, but VDG members very gently and patiently helped me along, and you can do it too! Here’s how: https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Submit_an_icon

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out more ways to help 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’re mid-cycle in Plasma 5.17 and still working hard to fix bugs and regressions, while planning for Plasma 5.18, our next LTS release! There’s also been continued work on our apps. Check it out:

New Features

• Dolphin’s information panel can now optionally be configured to show condensed dates (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  
• It’s now possible to hide the clock on the lockscreen until the password prompt appears, turning it into a 100% faithful reproduction of an old-school screensaver (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Tabs in Konsole once again visually indicate activity (Petr Velan, Konsole 19.12.0)
• Gwenview is now faster to load images located on a potentially slow network share (Robert Hoffman, Gwenview 19.12.0)
• GTK2 apps like GIMP and Inkscape no longer have mismatched background colors under certain circumstances (Mikhail Zolotukhin, Plasma 5.17.3)
• The “Launch” buttons in Discover now work on openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.3)
• Discover no longer displays a big empty area where the screenshots should be for apps whose metadata specify invalid screenshots (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.3)
• Scrolling in Discover is no longer choppy when using Wayland (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.3)
• Clicking on the right-most pixel in a maximized or right-tiled Firefox window once again interacts with the scrollbar as expected (Carson Black, Plasma 5.17.3)
• When using the Weather widget in a narrow vertical panel with the temperature display shown below the icon, its label no longer gets cut off on the right and left sides (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.3):
  
• When using Icon View in System Settings, the pages for SDDM and KWallet no longer show an ugly gray icon in the corner of the sidebar icon (Filip Fila, Plasma 5.17.3)
• It’s once again possible to search for widgets and other add-ons from the main Featured page in Discover (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The Touchpad System Tray applet no longer stays open after losing focus (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The behavior when left- or right-clicking on System Tray icons after hiding and showing them is now more reliable (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.18.0)

User Interface Improvements

• Selected Desktop items now subtly change their appearance to become an inactive highlight when something else gains focus (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  

How You Can Help

Qt 6 is around the corner! …And everything will need to be ported to use it. But don’t worry, the 5 -> 6 transition promises to be a relatively smooth one thanks to the Qt folks working hard on compatibility and us having already started the work of porting our software away from deprecated APIs. on that subject, it’s a great way to help out if you’re into backend work and appreciate a clean codebase. Check out the Phabricator workboard for the KF6 transition to learn more!

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out more ways to help 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 we continued fixing bugs in Plasma 5.17! We know that it was a bit buggier than the 5.16 release was, and we strive to do better. If you’d like to help out with this, please test our Plasma beta releases by switching to the unstable/beta testing repos in your rolling release distro of choice. For example, Arch and openSUSE Tumbleweed. Beta releases of KDE apps will show up in these repos as well. It’s super fun! Try it, you’ll like it! 🙂

New Features

• Dolphin now tells you what’s blocking unmounting a mounted volume (David Hallas, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  
• When importing photos, Gwenview no longer fails to import photos to paths containing slashes, and also now automatically creates folders as needed (Bard De Vries, Gwenview 19.12.0)
• The volume indicator icon on a Task Manager button can now be clicked to mute that audio source (Farid Boudedja and Björn Feber, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The weather widget can now show pressure in “millimeters of mercury” (Ismael Asensio, Plasma 5.18.0)

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Okular’s annotations now show times in your local time zone, not GMT (Oliver Sander, Okular 1.8.3)
• Dolphin’s embedded Konsole panel now recovers keyboard focus correctly after being closed and re-opened (Alex Miranda, Konsole 19.12.0)
• Konsole’s split view feature now respects the user’s preference to start or not to start in the current directory (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.12.0)
• We reverted the change to make checkboxes and radio buttons in GTK apps follow the colors in your color scheme. It ran afoul of a GTK bug that caused them to turn black when hovered over. We could not find a workaround for the GTK bug, so reverting the change was our only remaining option for the time being (Carson Black, Plasma 5.17.2)
• Fixed a common crash in System Settings when running on Wayland(Roman Gilg, Plasma 5.17.2)
• Random wallpaper slideshows are random again (oops, sorry about that) (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.2
• Discover can now cancel the installation of Snap apps without freezing (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.2)
• When Discover is run in another desktop environment, it no longer autostarts itself on login automatically, on the assumption that the other DE has its own update mechanism already (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.2)
• Discover now accepts URLs in the form “appstream:[app]“ (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.2
• When using a color scheme that results in black text on the login and lock screens, the text no longer has a weird fuzzy black shadow behind it (Filip Fila, Plasma 5.17.2)
• The System Settings Virtual Desktops page no longer has a broken layout when using wordy languages like German or Brazilian Portuguese, and the Window Decorations page has a better default size when opened in a standalone window (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.2)
• KMenuEdit can once again apply changes that require creating a directory as a part of the save operation (Wolfgang Bauer, Plasma 5.17.2)
• The “bouncing app icon” animation played while launching apps is once again visible for people using the (default) “Resolution Independent” cursor size setting (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.3)
• The “Defaults” button in the System Settings Fonts page now works properly (Kevin Ottens, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Titles in non-multi-page System Settings pages that are written in QML no longer receive a background highlight when hovering the mouse over them (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.64)

User Interface Improvements

• Dolphin’s extended search options view is now much more streamlined and space-efficient (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  
• The Digital Clock settings window now shows an inline preview for the configured time format, which is especially useful when setting a custom format (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The drawing tool icons have gotten a visual overhaul and are now more consistent with one another (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.64):
  
• Discover’s sidebar toolbar is now always at the top and doesn’t awkwardly scroll out of sight anymore (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.64):
  
• System Settings pages with multi-page navigation now display back and forward arrows in their headers to make navigation easier (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.64):
  

How You Can Help

I mentioned testing Beta releases earlier, but here’s something else! Do you like the idea of running a KDE-endowed free software operating system on your phone? I know I do. But did you know that KDE already has a mobile platform called Plasma Mobile? It’s real and it works and it needs your help to become mainstream! If this sounds like your cup of tea, check out https://www.plasma-mobile.org/findyourway/. You can read the Plasma Mobile project’s weekly updates in a format similar to this one here: https://www.plasma-mobile.org/blog/

More generally, have a look at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out more ways to help 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.

Plasma has a brand-new way to edit and customize widgets and panels: a global “edit mode” that can be entered using the context menu for the desktop and panel, or pressing-and-holding on the desktop with a touchscreen. While in this mode, widgets and panels are editable and movable. This solves a number of problems and yields the following improvements:

• The Desktop toolbox (that little hamburger menu in the corner of the screen that nobody liked) is now gone forever!
• The modes are now much clearer, with “Locked” mode being a mostly hidden thing for system administrators.
• The panel toolbox button (the “two sliders” icon at the end of your panel) is now hidden unless you’re in the global edit mode, which means that the bottom-right-most pixel of the screen can be used to trigger the Present Windows widget, or any other widget you put at the very end of a panel.
• Editing widget size and position is much faster while in this new edit mode.
• The panel context menu has been made more useful, and now displays more panel-related actions.

Here’s a video of it in action:

This work was mostly done by Marco Martin, with assistance from Björn Feber, and ideas from many others in the KDE VDG. The remaining rough edges will be polished before the release of Plasma 5.18 (which is an LTS release, let us not forget). Overall I find it to be a huge improvement!

But wait, there’s more! Much, much more…

(Other) New Features

• Toolbar items in Kirigami-based apps now respond dynamically to the amount of space available: when there’s lots of horizontal space, they all appear with icons and full text. As the amount of space decreases, they lose their text and then move into an overflow menu on the right-hand size of the window (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 5.64):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Fixed a common crash with wallpaper slideshows which could even crash your lock screen (David Redondo, Plasma 5.17.1)
• KRunner no longer crashes when used to switch to an open window (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.1)
• The System Settings Mouse page’s “Flat” acceleration settings really actually finally works now! (Mirai Komachi, Plasma 5.17.1)
• System Settings no longer displays empty items on the home page for pages that aren’t installed (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.1)
• In the System Settings Display Configuration page, the visualizations of each connected screen is now larger and more usable when more than one screen is connected, and text within them is no longer elided (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.1)
• Widgets on the desktop no longer lose their positions when an additional display is connected (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.17.2)
• KRunner’s default shortcut now works again for new installs (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.17.2)
• The Minimize All widget now correctly un-minimizes windows that it’s minimized (Vlad Zagorodniy, Plasma 5.17.2)
• The System Settings Window Decorations page no longer has a broken layout when using wordy languages like German or Brazilian Portuguese (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.2)
• Fixed keyboard input when screen sharing on Wayland (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The System Tray now correctly displays special “I need attention” icons for apps (such as Konversation) that have defined them (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The System Settings Night Color page now shows units for the “Transition Duration” setting (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• When you use the “Get New [thing]” functionality on the various System Settings pages, subsequent searches for a different thing from a different page no longer display items from the first search (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Frameworks 5.64)
• The icon used on the “Get new [thing]” buttons now imply downloading rather than marking something as a favorite (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.64):
  
• Konsole no longer leaves behind potentially large files in the system’s temp folder when it crashes or is quit by the system when shutting down or restarting (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.12.0)
• Dolphin now selects the correct file when using keyboard type-ahead and selecting a previously-selected file (Méven Car, Dolphin 19.12.0)

User Interface Improvements

• Spinboxes in the Audio Volume applet’s settings window, Weather widget’s settings window, and various System Settings pages now let you enter numbers using the keyboard so you don’t need to go insane manually clicking on the tiny arrows to change the values (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.1)
• Discover’s search field is now focused by default, so you can search as soon as the program opens (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
• In the System Settings Display Configuration page, it’s now more obvious that screens can be dragged around to re-arrange them (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The System Settings Night Color page now displays explanatory labels below the color temperature slider so you know what it will do (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Discover now shows each item’s category in search and browse lists (me: Nate Graham, 5.18.0):
  
• The System Settings Night Color page now has an explanatory label to help you understand what it does (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• List headers in QWidgets-based apps and System Settings pages now look the same as they do in the newer QML-based software (David Redondo, Plasma 5.18):
  

How You Can Help

Check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. 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.

Plasma 5.17 was released this week to glowing reviews! As with most new releases, our loyal users wasted no time in finding all the bugs we missed! So you know what that means, right? We all burned the midnight oil fixing the problems you found, and Plasma 5.17.1 will be released in just a few days with everything we’ve knocked out so far (detailed below) so never fear!

New Features

• The System Settings Widget Style page now has a shiny new grid-style user interface that follows the new format and looks and works much better (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The weather widget now shows windy conditions with fancy new icons (me: Nate Graham, Shawn Starr, and Carson Black, Plasma 5.18.0 and Frameworks 5.64):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Clicking the “Defaults” button in the System Settings Global Shortcuts page no longer erases all the Task Switcher shortcuts (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.12.10)
• The new startplasma-* apps no longer break multi-line shell functions and environment variables (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.17.1)
• When you plug an external screen into a laptop, close the laptop’s lid, and then re-open it, the laptop’s screen is now re-enabled as expected (Nicolas Fella, Plasma 5.17.1)
• Certain System Tray icons no longer have an ugly black background (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.17.1)
• Non-critical notifications are no longer inappropriately suppressed when an external screen is connected to a laptop and the laptop’s built-in screen is disabled (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.1)
• Some GTK2 apps no longer look weird after using another GTK2 app with global menu support (Fabian Vogt, Plasma 5.17.1)
• When one screen is a replica of another, the name of the replicated screen is now shown properly in the System Settings Display Configuration page (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.1):
  
• The NOAA environmental visualization picture of the day wallpaper now works again (they keep changing the structure of their website so parsing keeps breaking) (Yunhe Guo, Plasma 5.17.1)
• In the System Settings Display Configuration page, the rotation icons no longer have huge borders and mis-positioned tooltips (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.1)
• The “bouncing app icon” effect (which can be disable if you hate it, BTW) is now scaled to the proper size when using High DPI scaling (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.1)
• When the version strings in Discover’s Updates page become shortened because there’s not enough space to display everything, they now return to their full forms when the window is resized to add additional space (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The System Settings Compositor page no longer crashes in certain circumstances (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.64)
• Media icons throughout Plasma are no longer subtly blurry (Noah Davis, Frameworks 5.64)
• Accessing remote Samba shares is now more accurate when you enter the wrong password (Harald Sitter, Frameworks 5.64)
• KOrganizer is once again able to find and downloads add-ons (Allen Winters, Kontact 19.08.3):
  
• When Konsole is used outside of Plasma, its scrollbar no longer floats over the left side of the window (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.12.0)
• Search results in Discover are now more accurate, particularly for exact matches (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, AppStream 0.12.10)

User Interface Improvements

• Previews in the System Settings SDDM theme chooser page are no longer ugly when using a high DPI scale factor (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.1)
• The System Settings Display Configuration page now lets you switch between the settings for multiple connected displays using a combobox (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.1)
• Discover’s “Updates are available” notification is no longer persistent and once again disappears on its own, because there’s already a persistent thing in the System Tray when updates are available (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.1)
• The Plasma Audio Volume applet now uses an outline-style star icon for the “Default Device” buttons corresponding to non-default devices (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• The scale factor value in the System Settings Display Configuration page is now expressed as a percentage rather than a decimal, and now limits the increments to 6.25% on X11, which minimizes visual glitches in applications (this restriction is not present on Wayland, which is able to handle a broader range of scale factors) (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The System Settings Thunderbolt Device Management page now shows a placeholder message in the device list when it’s empty so you don’t think it’s broken (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• You’re now warned when launching a new Windows executable that can be opened with WINE (Yunhe Guo, Frameworks 5.64)
• Dolphin no longer tortures you by displaying advanced search options that won’t work when you’re searching in a non-indexed location; instead they’re just hidden instead (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 19.12.0)

How You Can Help

Check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. 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.

Lots of great backend work happened this week which is very important, but not terribly flashy. And most of the in-progress work I alluded to last week hasn’t landed yet. So I’m afraid the user-visible changes will have to be a bit light this week. But fear not! For Plasma 5.17 is undergoing its last rounds of final polish and bugfixing before the release next week, and work churns along on lots of great stuff slated for Plasma 5.18 and the next apps versions!

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Font anti-aliasing settings are now read and written correctly, so you get slight RGB font hinting by default as intended (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.0)
• When Discover is loading application screenshots, the loading spinners are now located in the right place (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.0)
• Discover no longer lets you futilely try to cancel update operations that aren’t cancelable (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.0)
• Discover now shows apps’ licenses correctly (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.0)
• The System Tray icon for KeePassX and various other apps now appear correctly rather than being rendered as white squares, are no longer inappropriately scaled down in certain circumstances, and no longer crash Plasma in certain rare circumstances (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.17.1)
• When Discover is being used for offline updates and an update operation fails, it now offers to repair the system (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Full Screen windows are no longer inappropriately movable or resizable on X11 or Wayland (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0)
• The System Settings Baloo file search page has been rewritten to have a shiny new QML-based user interface, which for now looks nearly identical to the old one, but provides a good base for fixing bugs and implementing new features (Tomaz Canabrava, Plasma 5.18.0)
• Kate’s editor color scheme chooser now works properly when used on a second High DPI display (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 5.64)
• Spectacle’s “Take a New Screenshot” button can once again be triggered with the Return or Enter key when focused (David Redondo, Spectacle 19.08.3)
• Dolphin no longer crashes when opened from the command line with a search schema (e.g. dolphin --new-window baloosearch://) (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 19.08.3)
• Dolphin’s Information Panel no longer includes hidden files in the file count unless hidden files are visible (Méven Car, Dolphin 19.12.0)
• Adding multiple albums to the playlist in Elisa no longer results in their songs being added in mixed-up order (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 19.12.0)
• K3B addons are once again listed in Discover (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, K3B 19.12.0)

User Interface Improvements

• Discover’s Installed apps list is now sorted by name (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.17.0)
• The Plasma Audio Volume applet and its System Settings page now have a more streamlined and less redundant display style, and look much more similar to one another (me: Nate Graham and Sefa Eyeoglu, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Konsole’s “Are you sure you want to close these tabs” dialog can now be made to never again appear (Kurt Hindenburg, Konsole 19.12.0)

How You Can Help

Check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. 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.

It’s been a big week for Dolphin with some new features, plus various improvements for other apps. Among them, KDE developer Christoph Cullmann went on a High DPI rampage and and fixed visual glitches in Kate and Okular on Windows when using a High DPI scale factor, and made great progress towards fixing the infamous line glitches in Konsole when using fractional scaling. Though still not quite perfect, it’s much better now.

Beyond that, a bunch of great things are in development which I can’t announce yet, but I guarantee that you’ll like them once they land in the coming weeks!

New Features

• Dolphin’s back and forward buttons can now be clicked-and-held to show a dropdown menu with the full history (David Hallas, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  

  

• The Places panel visible in Dolphin and other KDE apps now replaces the entries in the old “Recently Saved” section that never worked properly with brand new “Recent files” and “Recent folders” entries that work flawlessly (Meven Car, Frameworks 5.63 and Dolphin 19.12.0):
  
• Dolphin now lets you choose all the available options for what will happen when you open an executable script file (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Kate and other text apps using the KTextEditor framework no longer show glitchy horizontal lines when using a fractional scale factor (Christoph Cullmann, Frameworks 5.63)
• Fixed a bizarre rendering error with embedded Konsole panels in Kate and other apps when using two high DPI screens (Christoph Cullmann, Konsole 19.12.0)
• When Gwenview is used to crop an image with a fixed aspect ratio cropper and adjusting the cropper using the top-left or top-right corners, the crop area is no longer one pixel too tall (Alex Miranda, Gwenview 19.12.0)
• Konsole’s “Trim leading spaces” feature no longer removes empty lines (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.12.0)

User Interface Improvements

• The System Settings Displays page now has an improved scaling user interface: the slider now exposes the important scale factors of 1.25x and 1.75x but lets you choose a more granular scale factor if you’d like. If you do this on X11, it displays a warning that apps might look weird (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Okular now remembers view mode, zoom settings, and sidebar view settings on a per-document basis (Oliver Sander, Okular 1.9.0)
• Gwenview and Spectacle now have consistent user interfaces for their JPEG quality mode choosers (Felipe Peter, Gwenview and Spectacle and 19.12.0):
  

How You Can Help

Check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. 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.

With Plasma 5.17 due to be released in less than two weeks, developers are working hard to polish it up. It’s also time to look forward towards Plasma 5.18. Features are already starting to land and it promises to be another very cool release!

There’s lots of great stuff in the apps world too, including that Filelight is now in the Microsoft Store! KDE truly is all about the apps. 🙂

New Features

• The System Settings General Behavior page now has a global animation speed slider that controls the speed of all animations and lets you turn them off entirely (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• KSysGuard now shows stats for NVIDIA Graphics hardware (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0)
• System Settings now has a “Home” button that will take you back to the main page that shows the frequently-used pages (Björn Feber and Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Kate, KDevelop, and other apps that use the KSyntaxHighlighting framework now offer syntax highlighting for Perl 6 scripts (Jonathan Poelen, Frameworks 5.63)
• Kate now allows you to create new toolbar buttons that execute custom actions using the new External Tools plugin (Dominik Haumann, Kate 19.12.0)
• In Okular, you can now right-click on some selected text and easily find other occurrences of that text (Andy Sardina, Okular 1.9.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Discover no longer crashes on launch in KDE Neon. You can get the fix by upgrading manually using the terminal; run pkcon refresh && pkcon update (Harald Sitter, KDE Neon)
• The “Switch User” button on the lock screen no longer gets partially cut off on a 1366×768 screen (Kishore Gopalakrishnan, Plasma 5.17.0)
• Notification pop-ups positioned in a corner are now located equidistant from both adjacent screen edges (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.0)
• Fixed a common KInit crash that could happen when closing Dolphin while viewing the contents of an audio CD (Loïc Yhuel, Frameworks 5.63)

User Interface Improvements

• When the System Tray popup is open, notifications that would overlap it are delayed and hidden until it’s closed (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The Kickoff Application Launcher’s settings window no longer shows a vertical scrollbar by default and looks better overall (me: Nate Graham and David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• When hovering the cursor above a cursor preview in System Settings, the cursor now changes its appearance to match what’s beneath so you can see what it looks like and preview its animated effect, if any (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0)
• It’s now possible to select and remove multiple Bluetooth devices at a time (Daniels Umanovskis, Plasma 5.18.0)
• All of the desktop settings window’s sidebar icons are now colorful (Björn Feber, Plasma 5.18.0):
  

How You Can Help

Check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved and find out ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. 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.

Get ready for a massive load of improvement! And it’s all pretty darn shiny too because in addition to a ton of work on apps, we polished up Plasma to be as smooth as a marble for the 5.17 beta version (numbered 5.16.90), which is now available. The final product is due to be released in about a month, and as you’ll see, KDE contributors have been hard at work making it as awesome as humanly possible! A few things have slipped until the Plasma 5.18 LTS release, but that’s okay because it means 3 more months to polish them up.

Oh, one more thing before we begin: like Kate, Okular is now also available on the Microsoft store! This work is so important because Windows users who become accustomed to using free open source software on Windows are more easily able to switch to a fully FOSS platform, like a Linux distro running KDE Plasma. 🙂

New Features

• KSysGuard now shows per-process network traffic information (Arjen Hiemstra, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• It’s now much easier to change which device is playing or recording audio when multiple such devices are available (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• Kate’s External Tools plugin is back after an 8-year hiatus, allowing you to extend Kate with custom scripts to process text and files! Personally I find this to be huge, and affords Kate the power of my prior all-time favorite editor in macOS, TextMate (Dominik Haumann, Kate 19.12.0):
  
• Dolphin’s Information Panel now shows live previews of animated gif, webp, and mng files (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• KDE and Qt software is no longer blurry when using fractional scaling on Wayland (Roman Gilg, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• GTK3 headerbar windows are now properly resizable when run with a window manager that doesn’t yet support the _GTK_FRAME_EXTENTS protocol (e.g. KWin in KDE Plasma) (Carson Black, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):

  

• The lock screen no longer freezes and stops accepting input when using a smart card and entering the wrong password with fewer than 6 digits (Jason Franklin, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The Icons-Only Task Manager now shows progress information on the background of pinned apps only when they are currently running (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• Buttons in GTK apps using the Breeze GTK theme now visually show when they’re focused (Carson Black, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• When opened standalone, the System Settings Audio page now has a proper default window size (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• Fixed a regression introduced with KDE Frameworks 5.62 that broke executing Windows apps in WINE (Marcin Dłubakowski, KDE Frameworks 5.62.1)
• Fixed a very common crash seen when creating multiple nested directories in Dolphin or the file dialogs, or when copying files using KDE Connect (Ahmad Samir, KDE Frameworks 5.63)
• Gwenview is once again able to open all .xcf GIMP files (Albert Astals Cid, KDE Frameworks 5.63)
• When you try to copy something to a location that’s not writable, the operation will now fail immediately rather than futilely trying anyway and taking potentially a long time to fail (David Faure, KDE Frameworks 5.63)
• System Settings pages opened standalone in their own windows all once again have correct padding around the edges (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.63)
• Buttons in Kirigami InlineMessages are once again located in the correct place (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.63):
  
• When using a color scheme with inactive window effects, sidebars, drawers, and lists in Kirigami-based apps now become inactive-looking at the correct times (Marco Martin, KDE Frameworks 5.63)
• Tabs in tabbed views in various QML-based System Settings pages (e.g. “Audio” and “Window Decorations”) now render properly when using non-Breeze widget themes (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.63)
• Dolphin’s code to generate the window title and places panel names is now more robust, so it shouldn’t give incorrect names under certain circumstances anymore (Nazar Kalinowski, Dolphin 19.12.0)

User Interface Improvements

• Notifications that you have acknowledged in some way by clicking in them or hovering the cursor over them are now counted as having been read, and don’t cause the “you have new notifications!” bell icon to appear in the system tray once they disappear (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• When you ask to switch users and there are no other currently-logged in users, you’re now taken directly to the user selector to pick a user account to log in to (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The KWin Minimize All script and its associated Plasma widget are now more consistent in behavior: if the action is invoked while there are any un-minimized windows, those windows will be minimized, regardless of whether or not the script or widget has been activated before (Anton Smerkov, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The System Settings Display Configuration page has received a visual and user interface overhaul (Roman Gilg and me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The System Settings Font Management page is now High DPI compatible and has a more consistent user interface for its top search field area (Yunhe Guo, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The energy graph in Info Center’s Energy page now has X axis labels (Alex Debus, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• System Settings’ home page has received a visual overhaul and now shows tooltips when hovering the cursor over icons in the “Frequently Used” section (Tien Do Nam, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• Discover is now more clear about what’s going on when an updated app or package has the same version number for its old and new versions (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• KRunner can now be invoked with the Meta+Space shortcut as well (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.17.0)
• The Networks widget will now indicate any potential connectivity problems in its tooltip (Jan Grulich, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The Cuttlefish icon viewer app has received a user interface overhaul that practically amounts to rewriting the app from scratch! It now looks better, performs better, has more features, uses modern technology, and has a much cleaner codebase (Carson Black, KDE Plasma 5.17.0):
  
• The names of KWin’s window placement modes have been improved so it’s now easier to tell what some of them actually do (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.18.0):
  
• Items in the System Tray are now arranged in a consistent and unchanging way (Radek Hušek, KDE Plasma 5.18.0)
• Searching for a network share in KRunner or the any of the Application Launcher menus using \\sharename syntax now shows any matches at the top of the list, not the bottom (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.63)
• The “Full Screen Mode” menu item in various KDE apps now lives at the bottom of the View menu, rather than in the Settings menu (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.63):
  
• The “Refresh” and “Stop” buttons in the Properties dialog now have icons (Tien Do Nam, KDE Frameworks 5.63):
  
• Dolphin’s hamburger menu and context menus have been cleaned up and now feature coherent grouping in sections, a more focused and curated assortment of Dolphin’s functionality, better item text, and icons for everything (me: Nate Graham, Dolphin 19.12.0):
  
  
• Kirigami now has a new toolbar style that can optionally center the actions for desktop apps, and the Kamoso webcam app now makes use of it and shows you a desktop-specific UI when running on the desktop, for improved aesthetics and convergence (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.63 and Kamoso 19.12.0):
  

How You Can Help

Do you like the idea of enticing Windows users by making KDE apps more available to them? If so, check out this post by Kate developer Christoph Cullmann. Relevant skills include build systems, packaging, and promotion It’s very important work, and a key part of the new “all about the apps” initiative.

You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out other ways to help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. 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.