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.