This week in KDE: Plasma 5.18 is the release you’ve been waiting for

A ton of features, bugfixes, and and user interfaces have landed for Plasma 18, and a beta release is now available for adventurous types to test out ahead of the release next month.

I think this is the Plasma release that a lot of people have been waiting for. It’s faster, more stable, more beautiful, and more feature-filled than any previous release, and it comes with a Long Term Support guarantee. Nothing is perfect, and we can always do better (and always strive to), but I think Plasma 5.18 is going to hit a sweet spot for a lot of people. Look for it in the next LTS releases of Kubuntu and openSUSE Leap, as well as all the rolling release distros of course.

New Features

Screen auto-rotation now works on Wayland for computers with accelerometers (Roman Gilg, Plasma 5.18.0):
The visual settings for GTK apps are no longer required to be configured manually and separately; instead, they are automatically synced from your settings for KDE apps – except for the theme itself, which can still be set separately because there isn’t a 1:1 mapping between KDE and GTK themes (Mikhail Zolotukhin, Plasma 5.18.0)
The popular Thumbnail Grid Task Switcher is now shipped as a part of the kdeplasma-addons package (Chris Holland, Plasma 5.18.0)
The System Settings Background Services page has been rewritten to for better looks and usability (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.19.0):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

JPEG thumbnails are now subtly sharper and better-looking (William Tradewell, Dolphin 20.04.0)
System Settings no longer crashes when you click on the “Global Themes” item on the main page (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0)
KInfoCenter no longer crashes when you navigate between the Energy Info page and other pages (Harald Sitter, Plasma 5.18.0)
The calculator applet no longer displays bizarre results for certain multiplication operations (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0)
Checkboxes drawn on top of images and selectable list items are now always visible (Noah Davis, Plasma 5.18.0):
The feature that allows you to optionally set an image as the wallpaper when dragging it to the desktop now works with remote images in web browsers too (Tranter Madi, Plasma 5.18.0)
Discover should now be more reliable at locating apps no matter what their AppStream ID is; for example Blender will be accessible from both blender.desktop and also org.kde.blender (Aleix Pol Gonzales, Plasma 5.18.0)
Fixed a few visual glitches in the animations for the Widget Explorer (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.19.0)
It’s once again possible to set your default email client to be a terminal program and have everything work properly when you click on mailto: links (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.67)

User Interface Improvements

The System Tray’s settings window has received a major visual overhaul that makes it much more comprehensible and useful (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.18.0):
When you click on a notification, it now brings that app forward if the app doesn’t define a custom click behavior (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0)
Throughout Plasma and System Settings, the “Get new [thing]” dialog has a fancy new look and is much more usable (Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen, Plasma 5.18.0):
There are now keyboard shortcuts set by default for switching from one virtual desktop to another: Ctrl+Meta+Arrow keys (Björn Feber, Plasma 5.18.0)
Scrollbars in the Breeze style for desktop apps are now wider and separated from the content view by a subtle separator line. You can see it in the other screenshots throughout this blog post! Basically after trying the fake overlay scrollbar style for a few years, we decided that it just didn’t work so we went back to the older style. Note that on mobile we now use real overlay style scrollbars with no content layout hacks, but instead of becoming invisible, the scrollbar becomes tiny and hugs the edge so you can still see your place in the scrollable view. (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0)
It’s now much simpler and more obvious how to create a WiFi hotspot (Jan Grulich, Plasma 5.18.0)
Discover’s reviews sheet now has the proper width and is wide enough to display the reviews comfortably (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0):
A notification is now shown when Bluetooth device pairing is successful (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
Bluetooth devices that communicate their battery level now show that level in the Bluetooth applet’s popup as well as in the Battery and Brightness applet popup (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0)
The Plasma wallpaper slideshow feature now includes the default wallpaper path automatically so you don’t need to go hunting around and add it yourself (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)

How You Can Help

Please test the Plasma 5.18 beta release! You can find out how here. If you find bugs, file them–especially if they are regressions from Plasma 5.17. We want to get as much testing, bug filing, and bugfixing as possible during the one-month beta period so that the official release is as smooth as possible.

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 in KDE: more speed, more features, and a bug massacre

This week should have a little something for everyone. We’ve got bug squashing galore in preparation for Plasma 5.18, substantial speed improvements for wifi connection and Discover launch time, some welcome new features, and the return of an old one–renaming files from the context menu in file dialogs.

New Features

Okular tabs can now be closed by middle-clicking on them, and closed tabs can now be re-opened by using the new File > Undo Closed Tab menu item or the standard ctrl+Shift+T keyboard shortcut (Bob Bai, Okular 1.10.0)
There’s a new System Tray applet for controlling the Night color feature that automatically appears when it’s on and allows you to turn it on and off (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 5.18.0):
It is once again possible to rename files from the context menu in the open/save dialogs (Méven Car and me: Nate Graham), Frameworks 5.67):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Elisa’s header area no longer flickers horribly when the window is resized (Alexander Stippich, Elisa 19.12.1):
Konsole no longer freezes when copying in TMux Copy mode or after setting a really really long tab title (Mariusz Glebocki, Konsole 19.12.2)
Gwenview no longer crashes while generating thumbnails for images with malformed preview images (Christoph Feck and me: nate Graham, Gwenview 19.12.2)
Gwenview no longer lets you futilely initiate drag-and-drop operations with right clicks, middle clicks, etc (Tasos Sahanidis, Gwenview 20.04.0)
Plasma no longer crashes when you drag a file to the virtual desktop switcher (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.5)
Searching for an app in the System Settings Notifications page and then clearing the search no longer duplicates the items in the list (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.17.5)
Fixed various bugs pertaining to displays on Wayland such that KWin no longer crashes when an external screen is unplugged or turned off, turned on, or re-connected (Roman Gilg, Plasma 5.18.0)
Fixed two of the most common KWin crashes (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0)
Plasma is now faster to connect to a wifi network on startup by up to 3 seconds (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0)
System Settings no longer crashes when you try to install an invalid GTK theme (Mikhail Zolotukhin, Plasma 5.18.0)
It’s now possible to click on entries in the context menu for System Tray items on Wayland (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0
Discover now launches much faster and no longer shows a graphical glitch in place of its main user interface while it’s launching (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 5.18.0)
Icons-Only Task Manager apps now always show the “audio playing” indicator when audio is playing no matter the thickness of the Panel or the size of the icons (George Vogiatzis, Plasma 5.18.0)
It’s no longer possible to use window tiling shortcuts on the System Tray popup (Konrad Materka, Plasma 5.18.0)
When using a vertical panel, the clock’s “Long Date” format now shows all text instead of eliding most of it (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
Fixed a visual glitch causing the window titlebar to appear separated from the window content when using the Zoom In or Wobbly Windows effect (Vlad Zahorodnii and David Edmundson, Plasma 5.18.0)
The Audio Volume applet now has the correct size and no longer shows a big empty right margin when used on the desktop outside of the System Tray (George Vogiatzis, Plasma 5.18.0)
KRunner’s calculator now properly rounds long numbers (Lukas Pichler, Plasma 5.18.0)
Dragging in the text field while renaming items on the desktop no longer allows you to select other items in the process (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
Menubars in Electron-based apps are now more legible (Carson Black, Plasma 5.18.0)
Hovering the cursor over items in the GTK file dialog now highlights those items using the correct color (Carson Black, Plasma 5.18.0)
When using Chromium/Chrome with client-side decorations, the maximize button now changes appropriately when the window is maximized (Carson Black, Plasma 5.18.0)
Fixed a performance and battery life issue that could cause a rogue http.so process to stick around and consume power and CPU time (Kevin Funk, Frameworks 5.67)
Inline messages generated by the KMessageWidget widget are no longer briefly blurry on first appearance when using a fractional scale factor (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.67)

User Interface Improvements

When searching for tags in Dolphin, the tag menu stays now open after you select each tag so you don’t need to re-open it if you want to search for files with multiple tags (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 20.04.0):
Songs in Elisa’s playlist now make better use of available horizontal space (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.04.0):
The Battery and Brightness system tray applet no longer flashes irritatingly and consumes extra CPU resources when the battery’s charge level is critically low; between the persistent notification and the red icon, you’re not going to miss this (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0)
The Plasma Vaults item in the System Tray now automatically hides itself when there aren’t any vaults configured (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
Improved the wallpaper chooser UI in various ways: the time chooser spinboxes now show their labels inline, lists now have placeholder messages when empty, and wallpaper folder list items now show the full path in a subtitle (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
Pushbuttons used in Plasma configuration panels now have the same clear and obvious keyboard focus style as pushbuttons used everywhere else (Marco Martin, Frameworks 5.67)
Microsoft Windows link files now use the symlink file icon (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.67)

How You Can Help

If you’ve got artistic talent, rev up your digital paintbrushes and try your hand at getting your work seen by millions of Plasma LTS users for years to come in our wallpaper competition: https://community.kde.org/KDE_Visual_Design_Group/Plasma_5.18_Wallpaper_Competition!

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

This week in KDE: late holiday presents

Most KDE contributors are still recovering from their holiday vacations, but nevertheless the first of my 2020 predictions has been fulfilled: KIO now makes remote locations available to non-KDE apps using FUSE mounts! This brings us to full feature parity with GNOME’s GVFS system and makes it painless to interact with files in remote locations using apps like LibreOffice, Blender, and VLC. Full support will be shipped to users with the Dolphin 20.04 release.

More New Features

There are now thumbnail previews for cursor files (Kai Uwe Broulik, Dolphin 20.04.0):
Plasma’s amazing notification system gained support for apps to let you reply to messages inline (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

The context menu in the System Settings Network Connections page no longer sometimes appears in the wrong place when clicked (David Edmundson, Plasma 5.17.5)
The Alt-tilde shortcut to switch between the current app’s open windows now works on Wayland when Num Lock mode is active (Roman Gilg, Plasma 5.18.0)
The System Settings Icons page now correctly highlights the current icon theme when it was installed and activated using Discover, and deleting an icon theme no longer resets the view’s currently-selected icon theme (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.18.0)
System Settings no longer shows the dreaded “ambiguous shortcut” dialog when you hit Ctrl+F; the shortcut now works to focus the search field (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0)
KDE’s GTK theming now respects the GTK2_RC_FILES environment variable (Mikhail Zolotukhin, Plasma 5.18.0)
File dialogs opened by applications that only supports local files (e.g. Firefox when using the openSUSE patches to show the KDE file dialog) now shows disks and removable media devices in their Places panels (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.66)
Dolphin no longer crashes when you rename the trash can (Elvis Angelaccio, Frameworks 5.66)

User Interface Improvements

Elisa’s playlist now shows the full album and artist names in the header area instead of eliding after one line (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.04.0):
In Elisa, you can now play different songs in the playlist using the keyboard (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.04.0)
When using plasma-browser-integration, files downloaded using your web browser show up as recent documents in Dolphin, the file dialogs, and the application launcher menu (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0)
Discover now presents app and addon reviews more elegantly (KDE VDG and me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):
Audacity project files and Apple Wallet files now have nice Breeze icons (Kai Uwe Broulik and Carson Black, Frameworks 5.66)

How You Can Help

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

KDE roadmap for 2020

Yesterday I summarized some of my favorite new features, both big and small, added to KDE’s software catalog in 2019. Today I’d like to talk about the major features and improvements I expect for 2020. Note that this is not an official planning document, it’s just what I anticipate happening and plan to push for and help implement. Without further ado…

Guaranteed

These features are pretty much guaranteed, as they’re almost done or even in the process of landing:

FUSE mounts to better support accessing remote locations in non-KDE apps

Not mounting remote locations has been a longstanding deficiency in the KIO library that does file I/O throughout KDE software. Without this feature, users of non-KDE 3rd-party apps experience frustration when opening large files or streaming videos located on remote locations, when saving changes to those files, and when trying to to File > Save As to make a copy alongside the original.

Throughout much of 2019, a FUSE mount solution has been in development that alleviates these issues! You may have read it about on the blog of Alexander Saoutkin, one of the principal developers working on the feature.

A truly enormous amount of work has already been done, and at this point only a few more bits are needed before we can formally roll it out:

KIO::Open support in KIO-FUSE itself
File truncation support in KIO to support true random-access reading
Adoption of this file truncation support for Samba and SFTP protocols
On-the-fly translation of network URLs into FUSE paths to ensure seamless mounting of accessed network resources

When the patches for these improvements land, we will have full feature parity with the FUSE-based GVFS system that GNOME uses and the mount-based system in macOS! The patches are in progress and I expect them to all land in the next two or three months.

Privilege escalation in KIO and Dolphin

I’ve been promising this for years, talking about how it’s 90% done, then 99%, then 99.9%… you get the idea. I know, I know, I’m the boy who cried wolf at this point! Well, this time we really are on the cusp of victory. There is only a single patch left before we can formally turn it on! Once this happens, you will finally be able to create, move, rename etc. root-owned files in Dolphin without needing to run Dolphin as root or using a hacky extension.

Improved Samba share discovery in Dolphin

We have a patch that implements the WS-DISCOVERY protocol in Dolphin, allowing it to find Windows Samba shares on your local network, which are currently invisible. This has been a longstanding problem, but it’s now finally getting fixed! I expect this patch to land in the next few months, in time for Dolphin’s 20.04 release.

Auto-rotation for tablets, convertibles, and other hardware with rotation sensors

There’s an absolutely enormous patchset that implements this much-awaited feature. More than half of the patches have already landed, so the rest aren’t far behind. I have my doubts that this will make it into Plasma 5.18, but 5.19 is almost certain.

Likely

These features are likely, but not guaranteed:

Implement more of the proposed visual design changes to the Breeze style and KDE apps

The KDE VDG now has an exhaustive plan and sets of mockups for how we’d like to evolve Breeze, Plasma, and KDE apps in the near future: https://phabricator.kde.org/T10891. Check out the dependency graph! Here are some examples:

Pretty hot stuff, huh!?

Bits of it are already getting done. In 2019, we completed a UI overhaul of Plasma and many apps’ configuration windows to use the Form Layout style and a sidebar UI redesign, both of which have been quite well received. And there’s a new SimpleMenu based on VDG mockups in the works, which we hope to replace Kickoff as the default.

I don’t know if everything here will get implemented, but I expect us to push forward with a lot of it!

Better wallpapers in the extra wallpapers repo

A lot of the wallpapers in the plasma-workspace-wallpapers repo (which is optional but installed by default in many KDE distros including Neon, Kubuntu, and Manjaro) are a bit long in the tooth. Thankfully, we have a patch queued up and ready to go that will replace them with modern, beautiful, 4K wallpapers. Unfortunately this patch is blocked by the lack of a wallpaper cache, which means if we replace a wallpaper that someone is currently using, they’ll see a black screen after they upgrade. Not very nice. We’d like to cache the current wallpaper so that this doesn’t happen. I’m hoping we land the cache feature early in 2020 so that the next Plasma release after it can get the improved wallpaper selection.

Moonshot

These features are less likely (bordering on unlikely), but could get in with enough development work!

Per-screen scale factors on X11

There’s a patch implementing this feature that has been rejected thus far because it was not technically correct with the way Qt handled scaling at the time. However Qt 5.14 implements some backend changes that would appear to make this possible. I can’t promise anything but I plan to investigate this to see if it’s something we can do once Plasma depends on Qt 5.14, or if it’s feasible to add the feature earlier than that with a bunch of ifdefconditionals in the code to only turn it on for people using Qt 5.14.

Inertial scrolling throughout Plasma and QML apps

In theory, this is easy-ish. In practice, there are a lot of moving parts. Preliminary work began a few weeks ago, but there’s a lot to do before we can make it all work. It’s on the workboard though!

Power/session controls on the lock screen

This is something needed for Plasma Mobile, and all the Plasma developers agree that it’s fine to have on the desktop too. Development has not yet started, but it might!

—

What do you think? Seems like a bunch of worthwhile stuff, right? I see these features and improvements as critical for my ultimate goal of making Plasma and KDE apps irresistible for hardware vendors to ship by default (most of them at least; better wallpapers are nice but not critical). I want to make our offerings so good, and for KDE in general to be such a good upstream, that companies trip over each other to put Plasma and KDE apps on their devices! I think ultimately that’s the best way to get our software in front of more users.

If this sounds exciting to you, please feel free to help out–especially for items in the “Likely” and “Moonshot” lists, which are less certain to happen without help. You can help out by testing patches, implementing mockups, hacking on the new features, etc. For more information, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved. It’ll be interesting to check back at the end of 2020 to see how many of these projects have been completed. With your help… hopefully all of them!

2019: the year in review

2019 was a massive year for KDE. I’d like tho take the opportunity to highlight some of the biggest improvements and new features that arrived in this year:

Wayland

Though Plasma-on-Wayland is still not totally ready for prime time (and I understand now annoying this is), we made steady progress toward that goal, knocking out a number of blockers. 2019 featured Wayland support for virtual desktops, the proprietary NVIDIA driver, fractional scale factors, screen sharing and remote desktop, Spectacle’s Rectangular Region mode, and the Plasma widget explorer!

Plasma

One of the Plasma highlights this year is the totally rewritten notification system with a Do Not Disturb mode, per-app notification preferences, a sane history model, and loads of refinement and polish. It’s amazing, and it keeps getting better with each Plasma release!

Also very impactful has been a set of improvements in support for client-side-decorated GTK3 apps, including including shadows and extended resize areas and following the system’s color scheme. GNOME apps now look and feel right at home in Plasma!

Plasma also gained a systemwide Emoji input panel and a touch-friendly global edit mode for widgets. This allowed us to delete the Desktop Toolbox–that mystifying hamburger menu in the corner of the screen. Poof, no more!

In System Settings, there is finally full support for configuring touchpads using the Libinput driver, the Night Color feature was ported to X11, and the Workspace Behavior page gained two useful new controls that let you change the speed of all animations through Plasma and apps, and configure what happens when you click in a scrollbar track. In addition, many System Settings pages–particularly those in the Appearance section–have been modernized and given consistent user interfaces.

There were also many improvements to wallpaper configuration. The configuration window now displays the actual set of images that will be used, and the order is configurable. Picture Of The Day wallpapers can now pull images from unsplash.com.

To protect your privacy, Plasma now alerts you when an app is using the microphone.

Discover’s user interface and reliability dramatically improved across the board. I’m no longer seeing social media posts about how much people hate Discover (at least not the latest version; please make sure you’re up to date before you complain!). 🙂

Other miscellaneous features include a configurable grid size for desktop icons, user-customizable date display in the Clock widget, the ability to do calculation and unit conversion from Kickoff, and using slight RGB font hinting by default.

Finally, it became much easier to test and use a compiled-from-source Plasma version. Thanks to this, I’m now living on the master branch of Plasma all day, every day! It’s ridiculously stable, a testament to the incredibly high quality of Plasma’s codebase.

Applications & Frameworks

KDE’s flagship apps gained many amazing and useful new features. Among them:

Dolphin and file dialogs

Dolphin gained support for showing file creation dates, a feature to open folders from other apps in tabs instead of new windows, navigation history in a drop-down menu when you click-and-hold on the back or forward arrows, and animated previews in the Information Panel for video files and animated image files like GIFs. It also tells you what’s blocking unmounting a volume that contains open files, shows tags in the Places panel sidebar, and lets you search for tags.

Dolphin and other KDE apps gained file previews for Blender files, eBook files, .xps and Microsoft Office files.

Dolphin and the file dialogs also gained human-readable sort order descriptions and a brand new much better recent Documents feature.

File dialogs now let you easily switch between the same view modes as in Dolphin, and drag-and-drop a file into the main view to select that file or switch the view to that file’s folder (depending on whether it’s an open dialog or a save dialog).

Elisa

The Elisa music player gained an enormous amount of user interface polish, new features, and bugfixes–too many to list, really. It’s a powerful and user-friendly music player that’s fully supported and actively developed, and I encourage everyone to use it! Kubuntu is evaluating shipping it by default in their upcoming 20.04 release, and I hope others follow suit.

—

This is only a small subset of the new features announced throughout the year in my Usability & Productivity and This Week in KDE series, which in turn are small subsets of the full range of work done throughout KDE. Truly, our community is blessed with tireless contributors! Looking forward to 2020, I think we’re poised to achieve some truly amazing things that will catapult KDE Plasma and apps to the forefront of the Linux world. More on that tomorrow… 🙂

This week in KDE: holiday presents for you!

Though KDE contributors are mostly enjoying a well-deserved rest during the holiday season (hence the late post today, sorry about that), the community’s tireless souls have been laboring anyway to bring you new features and bugfixes anyway! Check ’em out:

New Features

The System Settings Plasma Style page now has a search field and a filtering combobox that can be used to narrow down the main view, just like the one on the Colors page (David Redondo, Plasma 5.18.0):
The System Settings Notifications page now has an entry for “Other Applications” so that you can choose the notification behavior of poorly-integrated apps that don’t identify themselves properly (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):
The properties dialog for folders now offers you the option to explore the folder in Filelight, if it’s installed (Shubham, Frameworks 5.66):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Elisa’s settings window is no longer implemented as a KCM (a System Settings page), so it no longer inappropriately appears in global searches (Matthieu Gallien, Elisa 19.12.1)
Dolphin’s SVN integration plugin now notices and lets you commit newly-added files (Dolphin 20.04.0, Nikolai Krasheninnikov)
Cursor themes installed with Discover can now be deleted on the System Settings Cursors page (Benjamin Port, Plasma 5.18.0)
On Wayland, the Widget Explorer is now usable (David Edmundson, Frameworks 5.66)

User Interface Improvements

Gwenview now includes a toolbar button in fullscreen mode to let you easily show or hide the sidebar (Madhav Kanbur, Gwenview 20.04.0)
Spectacle’s configuration window now has a “Defaults” button that lets you reset everything to the default settings (David Redondo, Spectacle 20.04.0):
Elisa’s playlist panel can now be shown and hidden from a button on the main toolbar, and automatically hides itself when the window becomes very narrow. This makes the app quite responsive (me: Nate Graham, Elisa 20.04.0):

(Try to ignore the horrible flickering; we’ll get that fixed)
Added explanatory labels for the single-click/double-click settings that help you learn how to select items (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.18.0):

How You Can Help

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

This week in KDE: it’s gonna be amaaaaaaaaaaazing

Features and polish are coming in hot and heavy for Plasma and KDE apps! But have you heard about KDE’s wallpaper contest for Plasma 5.18? We held one of these for Plasma 5.16 and it resulted in the fantastic “Ice Cold” wallpaper, by Santiago Cézar. Now’s your chance to enter a wallpaper for Plasma 5.18, which is an LTS release, so it will be seen by millions of people for years! There are fabulous prizes by sponsor Tuxedo Computers. Check out the rules here: https://community.kde.org/KDE_Visual_Design_Group/Plasma_5.18_Wallpaper_Competition

New Features

Dolphin now lets you include tags in the search criteria (Ismael Asensio, Dolphin 20.04.0):
When searching in System Settings, the results list now shows the actual matches pages, not just the top-level categories (Marco Martin, Plasma 5.18.0):
The Network Monitor widget can now be configured to show transfer speeds in Bytes (George Vogiatzis, Plasma 5.18.0):
It’s now possible to enable and disable Do Not Disturb mode with a keyboard shortcut (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 5.18.0):

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

Dolphin’s SVN commit dialog now works again (Nikolai Krasheninnikov, Dolphin 19.12.1)
Using a mouse wheel to scroll in Dolphin and the file dialogs no longer scrolls way too fast when using a view with large icons (me: Nate Graham and Arjen Hiemstra, Dolphin 19.12.1 and Frameworks 5.66)
Fixed a regression in the size of the weather widget’s temperature text when using a very short panel that I caused a few weeks ago while trying to make the text size identically match that of the clock widget. Now the issue is fixed and the text sizes really are always identical (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.17.5)
When you clear the clipboard contents, its last item is now really actually cleared (Piotr Dabrowski, Plasma 5.18.0)
When changing the font size, UI elements that dynamically enlarge or shrink themselves in response to font metrics now do so immediately in QML-based apps (Kai Uwe Broulik, Frameworks 5.66)
Manually-mounted NFS shares no longer show up twice in the Places Panel in Dolphin, file dialogs, and other apps (Méven Car, Frameworks 5.66)
Dates throughout KDE software no longer use ambiguous relative terms like “Last Monday” (was it the Monday of this week, or the previous one?); instead they revert to using absolute dates three days in the past or future (me: Nate Graham, Frameworks 5.66)
In OpenSUSE, using Discover to install an app while there are are available updates no longer silently installs the updates too (Jonathan Kang, latest OpenSUSE PackageKit packaging)